Writing

Why Hollywood Adaptations Suck

August 30, 2023 by Joseph K Little

In my opinion, most Hollywood adaptations suck. I mean there are some amazing things that come out of Hollywood – on occasion, geesh – but when it comes to adaptations, there’s almost always a serious flaw with the product. Why? For years I thought it was because the writers and producers didn’t really care about the source material, and I think this is still true in many cases. I’ve also thought that the writers and producers were victims of their own hubris, and again, I think this is still true in many cases. I’ve also ventured a few times into the “the writers or producers don’t care about the source material but would rather preach about their politics and will use whatever vehicle they can to do exactly that” camp. Here I’m willing to admit that maybe that’s my own biases at play, yet I still think that probably happens at least on occasion if not every time I see it. But after passing by a new fast food joint here in San Antonio, I think I stumbled upon a major reason, if not the major reason, why Hollywood adaptations often suck.

Definitions

First let me define “suck”. Here I am using the word to indicate that the end product has little to no appeal to the vast majority of its target audience.

Next, let me define “adaptation”. Here I am using “adaptation” as not just building something new off a license, but taking known works within that license and trying to turn that story or set of stories into (in the case with Hollywood) a movie or television show. I can only imagine, but I believe using established, successful works to create movies is appealing because the work is already proven. The benefit to the movie makers is that there is a pre-established fandom with stories and worldbuilding that has shown itself to be popular. A page-to-page transition from book to screen simply isn’t possible – ever. The mediums are simply too different, so changes inevitably need to happen. This is where things start to go off the rails.

The Problem with Mass Appeal

So we come back to the fast food joint and my epiphany. Corporations, particularly those in the restaurant business, typically all want a few things that are important to my argument here. First, every restaurant experience should be the same regardless of location. So if you walk into a Mr. X’s restaurant in London, it should look and feel very much like a Mr. X’s restaurant in San Francisco. The food you have in a Mr. X’s in London might be slightly different than the food you have in San Francisco, but the food you have in each location will appeal to the largest group of people in those areas with flavors and spice levels similar to the level enjoyed by peoples in question. A Mr. X Burger is a Mr. X Burger, but in London it might have Worcestershire Sauce on it, in New York it might have salt and pepper, and in San Francisco it might have no spice at all – flippin’ health junky hippies. (Chain eateries often have commissaries that provide the bulk of their food stuffs, so variations might be more regional than local if variations exist at all, but I think my general point stands). Ideally, each business entity has a long life, and local/regional stores can adjust within the corporate framework to maximize its general appeal.

Media franchises are short lived however, and media productions are often “one and done”. So movie makers rarely have an adjustment period to get things right. Television series have more leeway, but not much. If a media product gets something wrong, even naysayers will often poo-poo any changes to pre-established lore made after the fact, an act called retconning. It becomes vital, therefore, for media makers to get things right the first time.

I don’t know if enough people in Hollywood understand this fact. I mean, surely they do, but maybe, and I feel like I might be a little generous here, but maybe the stress and excitement surrounding being a part of a big project gets in the way of remembering that “getting it right” is vitally important. Honestly though, this is just another of many tangents I could go on here. So let me proceed to the point.

(FINALLY!) The Reason

Writers and producers have to take an existing work of art that (in my restaurant parallel) has strong flavors and potentially a lot of spice. They are tasked with changing the recipe – the story – in ways to appeal to the masses. I feel like these writers and producers have no idea what the mainstream really wants. They assume that they themselves are mainstream when they are not. In an attempt to reach the largest audience (the mainstream they think they are a part of), they rewrite things they don’t like or understand to something new to the story that appeals to them. The new and different flavors and spices of the original work are stripped and replaced with those the writers enjoy. The new product isn’t anything new; it’s the same old, same old with a different Instagram picture and name. The original fans are insulted. Adventurous folk looking for something new might be tempted by a new image and name but are going to find themselves wildly disappointed by the end result which they’ve seen hundreds of times already. The attempt to create something new that appeals to both established and mainstream consumers fails. Sales plummet, and there’s no chance to change (assuming the chefs in my apparent food metaphor even think themselves at fault).

Introspective folk would ask themselves what they did wrong, how it could have been better, or who do they really want to appeal to? But even if those people do exist, the nature of the writers’ room may not allow for such introspection. Do any Hollywood production companies have post-mortems to try to figure this stuff out? Or do they simply blame the source material, the director, the fans, or whomever is bottom of the totem pole and move on? I cannot say.

An Uncomfortable Truth

August 21, 2023 by Joseph K Little

Let’s just admit one thing. Everyone in the MCU, not just the heroes and villains, but literally anyone with an internet connection, knows what The Hulk’s junk looks like. Just let that sink in. Everyone. Hell, Japan probably has a scale model somewhere for people to take selfies with. At this point, if you are a modestly sane person, you are likely asking yourself, “What do you mean?” or “How is this important?” or even “What is wrong with you, Joe?” These are all valid questions. Especially that last one. So let’s consider these questions.

Bruce Banner is just a normal sized dude that turns into a green, bulging giant. His mutation however, doesn’t allow his clothes to change with him. The Hulk’s clothes just rip right off… except for his pants. I for one cannot stretch my belief that far, and yes, by that I mean to say that I can suspend my belief enough to allow for a small, normal pasty white guy to be able to turn into a giant green monster, but somehow the fact that his pants don’t rip off is a bridge too far. Maybe Bruce has thought ahead and always wears slightly over-sized, elastic pants. That’s reasonable. But elastic stretched that far is going to become incredibly thin and incredibly tight. Every detail of his manliness is going to be exceedingly obvious to even the most causal viewer. Consider that we’ve become an always online, filming everything interesting even if it might get you killed society, and you just know there would be film. The film would be enhanced, stabilized, trimmed, and distributed within minutes of its acquisition.

Everyone. Would. Know.

When I wrote The Hunger: Book One of the Diary of Charlotte, I basically wrote a superhero origin story. Charlotte is a scrawny girl of average height who similarly turns into a large(r) monster, albeit a different shade of green. Worse than just her size increasing, when fully transformed she has sharp, bony protrusions in random spots all over her body. Her simple clothes just would not last, and unlike Marvel, I didn’t try to pretend otherwise. Charlotte gets naked a lot. (Sorry other pervs, I didn’t go into detail). And while it isn’t a condition she revels in, it’s also not a foreign concept either.

When researching for the book, I found that public nudity in France around the 1800’s wasn’t too uncommon. Impoverished people in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens are sometimes shown to be nude or barely clothed. Additionally, before and during the revolution it became fashionable for liberty-minded women to wear clothes that exposed their breasts. Represented in art like the painting Liberty Leads The People by Eugene Delacroix (although the painting commemorates the later July 30th Revolution), the embodiment of Liberty was often shown with breasts exposed because Liberty is the mother of all people. Women of the time who were liberty-minded often expressed their political stance by imitating Liberty. For this reason, Charlotte isn’t necessarily completely adverse to being seen nude, but she is a little bit of a scrawny, awkward girl that values her privacy. I think I walked that line well enough, but then again, I would.

In the end, I don’t know why I think about these kinds of things. Earlier today, when I mentioned to my wife that I almost had my “The Hulk’s Junk” post finished, my daughter looked at me with a somewhat confused expression, slowly backed out of the room, and closed the door. Honestly, that reaction alone was worth this entire enterprise. I guess I’m just a little bit broken. Or awesome. I’m going to go with brawesome.

Yeah.

Brawesome.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Japan…

A New Process

October 16, 2020 by Joseph Little

Dilemma

Well, it has been more than a year since the last time I posted. Why? Because I haven’t done any writing in that time. OK. That’s a bit of a lie. I’ve done SOME writing, but I’ve largely been avoiding it like the plague. You know, by socially distancing myself from it months before the actual plague hit the US shores.

I’ve had trouble starting and staying started. I have a ton of ideas … until I sit down to write them. The shear joy of writing becomes a chore I begin subconsciously avoiding well before I ever sit down at my computer. I’ve even asked myself, “If I’m struggling this hard to write, do I even really want to?” The resulting stomach ache that immediately followed told me that giving up was not an option.

So, how do I continue? How do I restart with the immense weight of failure constantly pushing against me like Sisyphus’s boulder keeping me from a summit I’ll never see.

Happenstance

Then at work, I took a Fundamentals of Agile Programming training. There I and my other trainees learned about Agile Software Development (often just referred to as ‘Agile’). Without getting too bogged down in the formation and history of Agile, the principles of Agile were outlined in The Agile Manifesto.

While the Agile Manifesto concerns issues seen in the world of programming, one of my superpowers if to see parallels that exist in dissimilar items. I believe I can indeed compare apples to oranges in a way as to make the comparison valid to the discussion at hand … assuming that at least one of the two is relevant to the context at hand. Using my big brain, I saw how I could use certain practices and principles of Agile to improve my attitude and general writing process.

What follows are the most helpful Agile principles to my writing process.

Sprinting

One of the principles of Agile is to work in short “Sprints” with a limited, known amount of work. As I often get overwhelmed by the shear scope of the task in front of me when I consider working on any of my novels, I immediately saw this as a possible process that can help.

A sprint lasts two weeks, from Wednesday to Wednesday because Mondays and Fridays suck for starting and stopping things. The things I would like to get accomplished in those two weeks are outlined, given points that follow a weighting system, and posted to a Kanban board.

When I work on a goal (such as this blog post), the Post-It-Note that represents the item is moved on the Kanban board from ‘Backlog’ to ‘In Process’. Then once it is completed, the item again moves to ‘In Review’ then ‘Completed’. A completed item scores me the points it was weighted as on the board. At the end of each sprint, we evaluate the number of points of items I was able to complete.

So far … I’ve not done well. BUT I am doing better, and this metric is largely due to this process.

Stand Up, Sit Down

Another principle of Agile is to have a daily stand-up meeting with the team to discuss the success, failures, and complications of the sprint. This has been very powerful for me. Just talking about what I did or did not accomplish the day before has kept writing on my mind. If writing is on my mind then I am usually more likely to think of all the things I want to accomplish than to think of Sisyphus’s boulder.

My ADHD pushes me toward avoiding even thinking about things that are overwhelming or boring. Now if you’re a writer too, you probably already know this, but writing is both overwhelming and boring at the same time. It’s also lonely, difficult, and provides the least instantaneous of gratifications I’ve ever experienced. That said, when it’s good, time flies as the real world evaporates around you as your senses live in another reality that for now only you know.

It is an amazing experience.

Then the next day you read what you wrote the day before, and it is complete shit. But you know what? It’s done. Done means I get my points. Sometimes that’s enough.

Scary Mrs. Mary

The biggest change to my writing process is having an accountability partner. In this case my partner is my wife. She takes most of the Agile roles we are using, and she’s the person that leads the daily stand-up meetings. She keeps daily notes, and honestly that terrifies me. She’s even started keeping a record of the total number words that I’ve written for the week.

When I fail to get up and write one day, my wife is there the next day to talk about it. She doesn’t judge me, mostly. The daily stand-ups are not meant for judgement. They are meant for communication and a kind of communion of the spirit to finish the project.

I like to write in the evenings because I work during the day. Oh sure I could wake up at 5AM and write for two hours before starting my day, but the evenings are when I’m best. So when 8PM rolls around and I’m doing literally anything but writing, my lovely wife can, on occasion, cast judgement like the best of them.

She has helped keep me on track toward better practices more than anything else. So find yourself an accountability partner. Self-flagellation really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The Diary of Charlotte – How She Came to Be

August 27, 2019 by Joseph K Little

Origin Story

Upon my wall I have a one of my more prized possessions, the judgement of a short story I wrote that later became the basis of my first novel. At the time of writing, that novel is yet unpublished, but I have the manuscript back from the editor and a cover, so it is all but done.

The contest was the San Antonio Writer’s Guild short story competition back in 2014 (I think). Joe McKinney judged the horror entries. A handwritten note at the bottom of the page states, “Joe, Yours went to the finals but did not place.” I cannot say that I did not wish to win. I can say that I did not expect to win, or even place. I had only been doing this writing thing for less than a year by that point. Well … I had only been doing it for a year for the first time in near 30 years, but I wasn’t very good back then. I cannot pretend that I really, really hoped I would win though or at least place. How cool would that have been?

Super cool. Don’t lie to me.

Anyway, here’s what Joe wrote about my piece…

Notes on “Charlotte”
This piece manages to create an environment of creeping dread that has the reader cringing in anticipation of the conclusion. I especially enjoyed the description of the gluttonous aristocrats. Nicely done there. The choice of first person narration here is problematic, though. There is nothing wrong with the “main character has been dead all along” storyline. A number of successful books, stories and films have used it. But the trick is to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t fall into the trap of straining credulity while still making us really care for the fate of the person involved. I think what’s needed here, especially as the opening paragraph tells us that this is only the first half of the story to come, is for the author to establish up front some reason why a dead person is telling us her tale. That isn’t clear in this version. If you get the fact that she’s dead out of the way up front, you open yourself open to all sorts of storylines. As it is, with the death of the protagonist coming right at the midway point, you pretty much lock yourself into some version of the revenge tale, and that will be telegraphed to your readers. A story like this needs to upset the reader’s expectations, and the author of this piece clearly has the skill to do that.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me that’s a pretty amazing critique for someone who’s struggled with reading problems, ADHD, and language in general for much if not most of his (then) forty-three years alive. When I received my judgement all I could think was, “Wow. Just wow.”

And then my ego struck.

OK, so maybe I did not go full on Stewie, but I disagreed with Mr. McKinney. Revenge was not the obvious route for the story to go, at least not for me. So I decided to write the rest of the story which I hadn’t to that point. I hadn’t finished the tale because I imagined it being a bit of ‘found footage’ style story. You see Charlotte dies in the story. Yes. But she does not stay dead. I wasn’t rewriting The Lovely Bones. I was doing my own thing, but therein lay the real flaw of my story. The ending was too obscure.

Everything starts somewhere. Writing, like plants often starts in a pile of shit.

The Origin of the Origin

To explain how my ending became to obscure, I have to go even further back, to Gen Con 2014. It was my first Gen Con, and I was super excited. I was even more excited to learn that they had a sort of writer’s workshop going on at the same time, and I had JUST started thinking about giving my writing an honest attempt. One of the events that I purchased a ticket for was a “Critique: Read & Critique”. Basically each person attending would read a piece they have written and have a panel of editors give their opinions. I’ve always been the kind of person to do first and learn second, so I figured, “why not?” Well for one, I needed something written.

At this point I began trying to come up with a story to write. Now at any given moment, I can drum up a story idea from the ether without a problem, but this time I had an inspiring vision. Yes, a literal vision. No, I’m not the kind of insane that sees things that aren’t there. I am the kind of person that sometimes gets an image in mind so strongly that I experience it just like I might if I were there. And yes I am or was awake when this happens. OK. Maybe I’m a *little* bit of that kind of crazy, but just a little mind you.

Anyway, I saw clearly a dungeon door in front of me. The stone was an old grey that was almost black except the highest edges where wind and God knows what brushed the stones clean. I could almost see the humid air clinging to the stones despite the almost nonexistent light. The door itself was wood almost as dark as the stones, and it stood ajar. I knew that above my head and to the right, just out of sight of my snapshot vision was a hook in the ceiling. I also knew, somehow, that just outside of the door there was a girl and a large man. The girl was in a poor maid’s dress and the man looked like a combination of Lurch from the Adam’s Family and Solomon Grundy. I also knew the girl’s fate. She was destined to be clubled over the head, hung upside down from the hook, and bled to death.

I have only had a handful of these “visions” in my adult life, but they are profound. I figured, “That’s a good starting point.” And began thinking about my story. Why was the girl coming down into the dungeon? Who was that man that escorts her and kills her? Why is she killed? Well for me the answer was obvious.

Ghouls.

Now I know many people have a rather distinct idea of what ghouls are and how they look, but I kind of have an odd opinion about ghouls. I once read Lovecraft’s “The Outsider.” I took the story to be a man who’s lived and died and risen as undead. I assumed that since he resided with ghouls at the end of the tale that he himself was a ghoul, but I don’t believe that was never stated. Still the thought struck me as interesting, “What if ghouls did not know they were ghouls? Or what if they didn’t see anything unusual despite the drastic change in their ‘lives?’

For years I ran my ghouls in DnD as thinking creatures … that just happened to love eating human (or demi-human) flesh. Fresh was preferable to decayed, but decayed was still really, really good. So these were my bad guys, and this was the core of my short story’s plot. One ghoul, the butler was set to find more food while the two other ghouls, a count and countess maybe, feasted on their previous capture.

My first incarnation had the two ghouls talking to each other over a meal. The reader would not initially know that there was anything unusual about these two. Then as the story was to unfold, the two would say more and more disturbing things letting the reader in on the secret. Then eventually their butler would bring in a new victim, she’d be killed, and they’d tear into the new meat like the monsters they are.

I liked the idea of the story, but I hated my version of it. I honestly did not have the skills (or maybe the patience) to work that version of the story into one that wasn’t silly. So for version two, I changed the point of view to that of the girl. She’s homeless and being led to a “new job” underground … in the catacombs so I guess it’s in Paris, yeah, because she’s hungry. There were hungry people in Paris at some point wasn’t there? I seem to remember a movie or two with that kind of theme. Hunger … ghouls … WIN! So yeah, the girl is led to the room with the aristocrat ghouls and then she’s killed.

Then one of my readers said, “So she’s led to where some ghouls are and she dies. That’s pretty much to be expected. Otherwise not bad.”

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!!!!

OK. So I changed it up. She’s led down into the catacombs, is killed, and then turns into a ghoul! And the same reader came back and said, “Yeah, OK. She’s killed and becomes a ghoul. Right. That’s about the second most likely thing I’d expect.”

*Sigh*

So I changed the ending again. This time I lean hard into the imagery. I ramp up the dread. The girl is writing this herself, and in my mind the pages are written in blood. She has two supernatural beings in her head Hunger and Reason. Reason is trying to get her to run for her life, but Hunger tells her lies of all the things she’ll be able to get if she keeps with the ‘grey man’ leading her to work. She asks herself, why do they live underground? Well maybe they went into hiding during the Revolution and don’t know it is over. At this point, she’s cast aside Reason and under full sway of Hunger who she now calls her Mistress. She meets the count and countess, but blows the interview when she starts screaming at their horrid visages. So she’s killed, hung from a hook, and bled to death. I end the story with…

I assumed my hunger would disappear once I died, but as I drifted toward oblivion my Mistress was there with me whispering in my ear, “I will never let you go.”
And she did not.

Now to me this suggests many things. Many, many things. To the “glorious and judgemental” Mr. McKinney, it screamed “revenge plot!” Well sir, I would have you know that I wrote the ending that way just to make you wonder what might happen in the second half of that diary. Ha! Check and mate.

Except that’s not how writing works.

If the reader is confused by what they think is happening and what the author intended them to think when they wrote it, the writer failed to do his or her job. I wanted to leave the reader with wonder. Instead I left the reader thinking, “I know where this is going.”

Yeah, That’s great. So what?

Well I told you all of that just so I could tell you this. I started writing my first novel with a teenaged female protagonist set in Paris around 1820 just because I wanted to prove Joe McKinney wrong. My story is about a girl who … umm … gets killed and turned into a ghoul … and then tries to live a normal life? It’s a slice of (un) life story.

OK to be fair I originally had no idea where I was going to go with the first novel, and my first draft showed it, but once I figured out the end I set upon the last revision which – I think – is much better. The reader who I talked about earlier said he liked it, and as you’ve seen, he’s the kind of ass that would tell me if he didn’t.

Also let me say, I realize the written word conveys sarcasm and kidding poorly at best. I admire and respect Joe McKinney for his body of work and how he judged my first ever contest entry. Again, I have the write up hanging on the wall where I write. It inspires me, and I’ll always be grateful for it.

Thanks Joe!

What IS My ‘Why’?

May 28, 2019 by Joseph Little

Why is this sign in the middle of nowhere? Oooooh, now I get it. Clever.

Why do I write?

I’ve tried answering that question a number of times, but each time I do, I feel like my answer misses the mark. Here are some examples:

I just have to.
To be a good example for my daughter.
I always wanted to.
To fulfill the desires I had as a kid.
Because I create.

All of those feel right, but they all fail as well. I don’t know why.

There are days when I sit down to write, but for the life of me, I just can’t find the willpower to do it. I have ADHD, sure, but the meds don’t help me with this particular issue either. So what is it? I feel like if I knew my ‘why,’ it would help me get over this horrible push back, this resistance that forms somewhere in my gut and pushes me out of my chair to do literally anything else.

So what is my ‘why’?

I didn’t create this. I’ve never owned enough Legos to put something so large together.

I am a creator.

I am and have always been a creative type. When I was a kid I would draw. It was natural. Dinosaurs were an early love, then Godzilla, and eventually dragons. Reptilian-like creatures have a soft spot in my heart for some reason, but hey, dinosaurs, Godzilla, and dragons are really cool.

As I got older I would make things. I would take art that I loved from magazines, cut them out, and put them on my walls. I had things from a vodka ad where polar bears pulled a sled to Chester Cheetah stuck on my wall. I took my father’s tools and a slat from under my bed and made a sword. I used string and metal to make bolas. I enjoyed the wonder and possibility contained in these things and what they represented.

When playing with my action figures became less interesting as I grew older (maybe too old for some), I made dioramas with them. I put them in dramatic poses fighting one and another. The wizards I hung from a string from my ceiling since they could fly. Man, I wish I still had those figures.

When I moved into playing more and more Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, no one really wanted to run the games other than me. It felt like a natural calling to me though. Premade modules were where I started, but I was soon creating my own adventures. I wasn’t drawn to the stories behind the adventures at first, not for many years in fact due to my poor reading level and hatred of English class. I wanted to create interesting combinations of monsters, dungeons, and treasure. This really stirred my imagination.

It was only after I found that there were actually books that I enjoyed reading, that my skill with reading, English as a language, and storytelling began to develop. Unfortunately, this wasn’t until my sophomore year of high school. The sheer number of things I read in the next three years catapulted my language skills, but I only near the end of my high school career did I even begin to imagine storytelling as a possible future career. When I did, I was basically told I wouldn’t be able to hang with it, and in all honesty at that time with my undiagnosed ADHD (because it was not even a thing back then) and my short but frequent bouts of depression, I would have been as unable to hang with it as I was unable to hang with the architecture degree that I attempted.

I once drew a comic strip called “The Hillbilly Surf Gods.” It was fun. I could draw things that weren’t super complicated and write little short jokes and people enjoyed them. It was the ADHD that killed that, however. As soon as I started thinking that I might actually do something with my cartooning, it became more of a job and less of any enjoyment. So that fell away too.

I continued to play DnD, mostly as the person running the game (the DM, or Dungeon Master). This provided me lots of story creation experimentation. More it allowed me to do one thing that I really love. It allowed me to create characters. Lots and lots of characters. It also allowed me to create situations that would humor or intrigue my friends.

I am an attention whore

I am the fifth of six children, and I fucking love attention. I guess I was the baby for seven years until my little sister, the brat, came along, so I was probably the center of attention for a long time. Until I wasn’t. That probably had an impact. I also grew up a northern Catholic in a southern Baptist town. So while I craved attention, I had few opportunities to make friends to either give it to me or break me out of needing it. That’s probably why I became the jokester in our family – as a means of garnering attention.

I think ADHD also played a significant role in my road to becoming an attention whore. Getting attention from people is a little thrilling which is the kind of stimulation that people with ADHD lack. The stimulation makes us feel normal (or in my case ‘more normal,’ amiright fam?) This is also probably why I have made so many really bad and/or inappropriate jokes over my life. I often wonder how many people have I alienated because of my need to make any kind of impression possible. Man, ADHD sucks. What could I have done if I’d had a normal life up until now?

When I write, I get a little thrill when people tell me I did something they liked. I think I get a little thrill when they tell me they didn’t like it too. Only if I bore them do I feel like I’ve failed. Similarly, when I create something and people tell me they like it or that they can see I’m improving, I get a little thrill.

I start more conversations and insert myself into more conversations than I should. I really like the idea of sitting alone and not talking to anyone, but I think my craving the attention of others makes me want to insert myself. That really sucks to realize. I don’t think I would like me if I weren’t me, but I have a lot of friends that seem to like me so maybe I’m doing something right.

Getting the cold shoulder from someone is killer to me. I’d rather be yelled at or hit than for someone to just stop talking to me. All because of something I likely could not control. Mix in the depression I’d been going through a few years back and I can easily see me not being the kind of person someone would want to hang around with.

What is best in life, Conan?

For me, leaving something better than one finds it, is best in life. I try to smile a lot, because as my father used to say, “Smiles are contagious.” It costs nothing, but the impact a smile can have one someone else’s life can be significant. I can’t smile in the things I create. I can’t smile in my writing. But if I can leave a person happier for the time they have spent with my creations, then I have left them better than when I found them. I don’t think this is why I write, but I do think it is why I write the things I do write and how I write them. I want to entertain. I write to create. I write to get the beautiful attention. I write to entertain.

I cannot say that I write to make my characters’ lives better if not anyone else’s life better, because I do some bad stuff to some characters. I make them experience the feels hardcore. (I think that’s how the kids talk these days.) I don’t necessarily leave my main characters better off at the end of their journeys than I have them starting out, but I’m not writing for the characters.

Who am I writing for then?

I wonder if this is a valuable question. I mean I’m writing for me. If so, why do I desire to publish? Is it only for the attention whore in me, or do I have another reason? Will sales translate into validation? If so, then would I not be better off writing for the audience than writing for myself? Or is there some middle ground where I get to write what interests me and find an audience that is also interested in it as well? That seems like a really good way to remain undiscovered and lacking a real audience if you ask me. Luckily no one has yet asked me, but is the question of who relevant to the why? I don’t know. Not yet.

Is there more?

I often tell people that I don’t want to say anything special with my writing. I don’t want to teach anyone anything. And that is mostly true. If I could teach anyone anything, it would to be happier and to be more grateful. I would teach people to love and forgive. I would teach people that mistakes are natural, and not only are you going to make them, and make a lot of them, but other people are going to make them too. We can’t hold ourselves to an impossible standard, but neither should we hold others to standards that may be impossible for them at this time. Maybe my characters and the plots they encounter will eventually show a pattern of such things, but more than anything else, I hope that I entertain people.

Is it bad that I would like everyone in America to be just a little happier? Is it bad that I would gladly accept a single dollar bill for that little bit of happiness from each person? 😉

So, why do I write?

I write because I must. I must create. I must share. I write because I want the validation of people I don’t know. I write because I’m an attention whore. I write to hopefully make the world a little bit better than it was before people became aware of my work, and I write because it interests me.

I don’t know if I have a clear and single ‘why’?

I write because I’m a writer. Does there need to be more to it than that?

Book 3 and The Repeat of Everything I Thought I Already Mastered

May 20, 2018 by Joseph Little

I’ve completed 2 rough drafts of 2 novels and a couple revisions of the first one. Right now I’m trying to finish the 3rd rough draft so that I can make all the books work together nicely … and I’m stalling.

Stalling. Flaking. Procrastinating. Whatever you want to call it. All of my successes are irrelevant, and right now I’d like to do nothing more than get the f’k out of Paris.

The feel of book 3 is very different than book 1. Charlotte has undergone a lot of change, yet her primary problem remains the same. Book 3 is where she realizes this and has to confront it … or not because she has more options than ever. Book 3 is where she faces what it really means to be a monster even though she thought she had that down in book 1. Book 3 is where I take a bunch of loose threads and pull them all real nice tight on the back side of the story so its tits pop out real nice on the front side. Except … I’m not yet sure I have the tits for it. Or if I’m pulling the right stings. OR if I’m even working with a corset here … maybe I have some man’s stained tighty whities instead, and I’m showing junk most people don’t want to see. This has me kind of paralyzed despite knowing that this is exactly the kind thing (if not the same metaphor) I was dealing with toward the middle of books 1 and 2.

And then I have to remind myself … “Yeah OK, so what?”

Done is better than perfect because perfect is impossible.

I’ve wasted weeks of not writing because … I’m lazy. I’m blocked. I’m scared. I’m bored. I’m busy. I’m a liar to myself saying that I’ll do it tomorrow, yet every day is the same.

Still, people believe in me, or at least believe in my potential – which is just as good for me. And just as bad. But you know what? Fuck it. I’ve got work to do. So I’m going to do what I can to do and be happy to have it done.

You go do the same. Go create something new.