Start-to-finish: seeing it all together

Like most puzzles, the creative process makes more sense in retrospect.

This site and the creative process it represents may seem jumbled and confusing. But it’s not. At least not any more than our minds are.

In an effort to offer some retro-perspective, and thanks to Marisa’s suggestion, I’m going to post synopses of the creative process for completed works. Consider it a single-post “proof of concept” for the basic premise and architecture of this site.

Let’s start with two examples, one simple: Washer Woman
Below that, one more complicated: Molasses

Washer Woman – start to finish

When you’re collecting inspiration in the beginning stages, it’s often hard to know where it’ll end up, so tagging it according to a project can be hard to do, unless you do it in retrospect. However, this project had obvious inspiration.

Inspiration

This story began with a painting and a request from my artist-friend Dave to write a myth. However, I didn ’t want to write a myth, so  I was a bit stuck on how to approach it. But then I received an issue of ZYZZYVA in the mail whose cover image kicked everything into gear. These pieces of inspiration can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/21/photo.227/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/03/photo.278/

Notes & Drafts, Iteration after Iteration

After that, I basically wrote the main heart of a draft on the train. Not a complete draft, but the voice, characters, setting, and much of the language.
Notes can be found here, as well the the draft into which they were compiled:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/22/photo.285/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/26/photo.286/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/22/file.226/

Then came needing to make sense of the draft, asking some hard questions, fleshing out some character details from looks to quirks to motivation. You may notice that the bum who formed the Milos character from Molasses also formed the Minks character here. At least in appearance. I also knew I wanted to explain the Washer Woman’s myth itself through her song, which presented the challenge of writing some lyrics and when in the story to reveal them.
These notes can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/02/photo.288/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/03/photo.321/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/04/photo.322/  

And subsequent drafts (note the comments which reveal the state of the draft):
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/03/file.280/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/17/file.307/

More notes on the lyrics to the Washer Woman’s song, and thus what Minks thinks of her. The last two entries contain drafts of the lyrics themselves:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/21/photo.325/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/25/photo.343/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/02/photo.363/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/07/photo.362/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/09/photo.361/

Revision notes, partial edits, and the second draft:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/24/file.340/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/09/file.354/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/10/file.365/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/22/file.385/

I sent the second draft out to a few friends for feedback, and posted their edits and notes here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/24/file.395/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/31/file.406/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/06/file.417/

This feedback sparked another round of note-taking, focused on filling in some holes in revealing the fear of the characters through little scenes. These notes can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/14/photo.440/

Renderings

And that was that. I completed a tight first draft which I submitted to a couple contests. This can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/12/file.433/

And as the term “rendering” implies, this actually went through one more change, shortening it up and killing a superfluous character (Parker), and trimming up the scenes from three deaths to only two. The final, shortened version can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/12/22/file.536/

Tada! See how easy? As much of the thought process as is possible to capture has been captured here in these posts.

Molasses: start to (almost) finish

Inspiration

Molasses began as the confluence of a few ideas. I wanted to write a story for Omnibucket’s “God’s Acre” series about a French chef who wanted to marry the daughter of an American mob boss. The chef was talented and ambitious and ran an upscale restaurant for what he deemed true fans of food. He had an uncanny knack for inspiring strong emotions through taste and smell with his foods. The mob boss used his daughter to blackmail the chef into running the kind of restaurant he wanted with traditional basic foods. Eventually the chef gets fed up and starts experimenting with his foods and ultimately kills the mob boss through food.
Meh. Not really all that compelling. I wrote a passage I loved about the chef getting scolded by the mob boss in his office while the chef just flipped the folds of his toque, all one hundred of them, staying calm by thinking of each way to cook an egg as his anger over the mob boss grew. But that’s really all I had. Unfortunately these notes are in papers that were buried somewhere before I started this site.

Inspiration & Notes

The idea sat in my head for a while fermenting. About a year later, a few things in a short time.
First, I had an odd experience with a homeless man which would end up being the introduction to Milos’s character. The first mention of this was here: http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/03/25/azas-reflection/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/03/22/photo.88/

Second, I went to a Mexican restaurant where I met a server whose face and body had such personality that I knew he had to be a story’s character. And probably an evolution of this chef character. He was thick but short, covered with dark hair, and had an enormous head and hands, but was so gentle and thoughtful about every movement. As I ate my delicious carne asada, molasses came up in conversation, and I learned from Angie that a molasses silo had exploded years ago, and the flood of sugar actually killed a bunch of people. I was thoroughly amazed, and instantly pictured this stocky mexican man angered by his boss who demanded he use molasses in all his dishes, taking a hatchet to the silo in the middle of the night and causing the flood.

I started writing a description of Chin the waiter in Milton’s voice, a description of Milton, and sketched out five characters: Chin, Rose, Elefant, Milton, and the Buzz. I’m struggling with the actual story, but there are cooking-related parts left over from the original idea.  You can see me exploring the characters’ motivations, and struggling with what/whose point of view to tell the story from. A major hang-up was trying to find places to put passages previously written, such as the scolding going on in the office as the character flips his toque. These toiling notes can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/03/29/photo.90/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/06/photo.91/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/08/photo.92/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/11/photo.44/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/16/photo.86/

There didn’t seem to be enough with this whole mob boss/daughter’s love thing, nor with the whole restaurant ownership/food-based thing. Struggling for some keys to the story, I introduced the idea of someone being assassinated in the end from the bullet of a single-bullet gun. This brought about the secondary, weaker character who was always threatening to kill himself. I also knew the office of what was previously the mob boss was a central image, with its large paintings of ancestors hunting, and its glass-cased hatchet on the desk. But I didn’t know why. I wrote that scene twelve different ways, without it really even being a scene. I also brought in the idea of The Rose, my little assassin character, but had no idea why. Yes, it was starting to get complicated.

So I put a halt and started asking the all-important “what if?” questions while continuing to collect lines, some of which would make it through to the real story.
Then, a couple more incidents occurred for me. First, I had a brief conversation with my grandfather in Romania who complained about being old and ready to die. Angie complained that if we didn’t go visit him this year we’d probably never see him. Around the same time, my friend Charles came to visit me. He’s Korean but he was born in Bolivia and named Carlos after the doctor that birthed him on some mountaintop that Charles’s mother heard would be good for optimal infant health. I thought of the Mexican man’s face and realized it could also be Eastern European, maybe Romanian, and imagined his name as Kim, named after a Korean doctor who birthed him. Kim became a representation of Charles, mixed with myself, as he wondered what his true family and true home might be.
These notes can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/20/photo.151/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/22/photo.229/

Drafts & Notes, Iteration after Iteration

“Slow as Molasses” has a first draft (and a terrible name which I’ll eventually change), which is really just a compilation of all the ideas and lines and scenes and notes above (plus some from the original story that never got written). This note-taking and draft-sketching process went round and round as lines began flowing with no context, voices of major characters like Phantos emerge, as does the tone of the piece. I’m still trying to cram too many ideas together, which is the main struggle because I can’t settle on a point of view to tell the story from. All these notes and drafts can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/23/file.96/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/24/photo.230/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/25/file.103/

Some point thereafter I read the Watchmen graphic novel. Finally. It was great, and sparked another of the conversations I tend to have with my friend Eric. He always talks like every sign is the end of days. Watchmen had that in there too. But it got me wondering about that being a social disease, or maybe trait, to sound less pessimistic. Perhaps it’s always that way and it just rolls on and on, and maybe we need it to be. A socio-biological need for a pre-apocalyptic state. So I wrote a page or two in the voice of someone wading around in a molasses flood, looking at all the stillness within the deathly scene, sounding very undramatic, as if this was the way the world was, and would always be because we needed it to be that way. It was a sort of dramatic undramatizing of an otherwise horrific scenario. I loved it. The idea of this character being an “in-betweener” here, unsure of his role, not likely to believe either side yet, seemed to fit perfectly with someone trudging through the molasses. Once I started asking myself why he would feel that way knee-deep in a molasses flood, the rest of the story and Kim’s background really started taking shape. These notes and patchwork-style “drafts” can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/26/photo.231/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/28/photo.232/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/29/file.149/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/30/photo.233/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/01/file.158/

A good couple note-taking days for this story follow. More bullshit about this assassin thing which gets cut, but also more elaboration on Kim’s thoughts while trudging through the molasses. Getting some detail of what’s in the flood. Also, the snow shovel enters (which is actually inspired by a real life event) which always cracks me up. The “she wasn’t the prettiest” line, which ends up in Washer Woman. Phantos’s black wooden spoon (based off a gift Angie received from a Russian co-worker). Various scenes including the octopus-beating man, and general flood detail. Phantos’s “It’s good to be cookoo” line which was said to me by an old Czech man I met on a gondola in Mammoth, California while skiing. These notes can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/02/photo.234/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/04/photo.235/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/06/photo.236/

Now I realized I have to trim the story down of elements. There’s too much. Start focusing on molasses, tsoika, and the three characters. Phantos and Kim get some backstory. The idea of it focusing on what each of the three has to lose or gain by the flood, and that it may contain family artifacts of each of the three main characters. The last note contains the line “If a supremely well-meaning act can lead to such inhumanity, then why not the opposite?” which is a question I love, and which drives much of this narrative, particularly when mixed with the nostalgia we give to otherwise incidental items.  These notes and drafts can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/08/photo.237/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/10/photo.238/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/12/file.179/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/12/photo.239/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/13/photo.240/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/14/file.206/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/14/photo.241/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/15/photo.242/

And some more notes. Scenes are forming which actually stick to the final. Tsoika and molasses, the sound of a radio.  Phantos starts hitting his stride as a character. Some facts about my grandfather enter.
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/16/photo.243/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/18/photo.256/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/22/photo.285/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/26/photo.286/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/30/photo.287/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/02/photo.288/

A mid-stream bit of inspiration in finding some Hungarian curses:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/20/link.220/

At this point, everything from the original idea has been transformed. The old mob boss outline became Phantos, the de facto town leader. The assassin’s character became the dead grandfather who was called The Rose. And the suicide-threatening sidekick with the single-bullet gun became Milos the drunk. The rest pretty much came from that. A man without a family or home based identity to speak of, who visits the town of his grandfather for the first time, but the man has died before Kim gets there, and the town has mysteriously been flooded with molasses. The molasses disaster became the strange backdrop and allowed the plot of a character who didn’t even know why he was there to focus around a mystery of why the flood occurred, and those smaller mysteries of what artifacts of his grandfather’s life he might find in the flood. So I started re-writing a new draft from scratch, while taking more and more notes on what Kim and Milos find while sorting through the flood, and questioning both the grandfather’s history and the characters’s motivations. These notes and drafts can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/26/file.347/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/09/photo.361/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/12/photo.374/

But now came the question of an appropriate ending. I can’t say what made me think of it, but everything about the feel and increasing tension of these characters demanded a unique ending. I was having fun with Phantos and the questionable nature of morality, as well as the triumverate of characters as the poles driving the story, driving each other further apart because of the importance each assigns the things of the past. “Three men attached to pasts, unable to move ahead, living through the suspended present, wondering how it happened, what it means, weighing meaning by a dead grandfather,” appears in my notes. Then I realized it had to end with a joke. A killing joke, much like the Alan Moore “Killing Joke” graphic novel, but amongst three iconic personalities instead of two. It would be tricky to pull off, but this provided a perfect goal with which to approach the rest of the note-taking and drafting process. These can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/15/quote.371/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/25/romanian-curses/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/16/photo.373/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/20/photo.424/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/25/photo.425/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/24/file.386/ 
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/01/file.408/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/26/file.449/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/27/photo.460/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/28/photo.463/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/28/photo.464/

Then came a first real rough draft can be found here, as well as the inkling that I might be into the beginning of a novel, not just a short story:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/29/file.455/

And here’s the draft I submitted to my writing workshop, with notes from Marisa:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/09/16/file.480/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/10/01/file.501/

With that, I took the draft and tightened it up into a novel exerpt version:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/12/22/file.535/

It’s all there, and now the rest just needs to be written. So…more to come soon.

Photos from Japan, Part 4. As I said, these are by no means all of them, and I did my best to keep out any landscape, landmark, or tourist pictures. These are just for stories. See my PicasaWeb for the full set.

Photos from Japan, Part 3. These are by no means all of them, and I did my best to keep out any landscape, landmark, or tourist pictures. These are just for stories. See my PicasaWeb for the full set.

Yes, one of me that I snuck in.

Photos from Japan, Part 2. These are by no means all of them, and I did my best to keep out any landscape, landmark, or tourist pictures. These are just for stories. See my PicasaWeb for the full set.

And more to come.

Photos from Japan, Part 1.

Some photos from my recent month in Japan. Characters and settings aplenty. Use ‘em before I do. These are by no means all of them, and I did my best to keep out any landscape, landmark, or tourist pictures. These are just for stories. See my PicasaWeb for the full set.

 More to come.

One of a number of beautiful courtroom sketches which made me wonder what’s going on in the heads of these severly underappreciated artists. Sort of amazing that this is still a professional, really. Something worth looking into in a story, methinks.

Oh, for the curious, this sketch is of The Hurricane. Click the image for more. 

Storyglossia

New journal I found, on account of Rob Ehle, Stegner Fellow.

Submission Guidelines here.

Graphic story by Eliza Frye from Narrative Magazine.
Story is ok, the art is lovely, but even more I’m happy to see graphic stories (not "comics" mind you) appearing in litarary journals. Well done Eliza.

Featuring:

Hugh Sheehy
Armand ML Inezian
Ann Beattie
Alvin Handelman
Melanie Rae Thon
Eileen FitzGerald
Evan Lavender-Smith
Ingrid Hill

Nihon de Update #6: Tropics haz ur flutterbys

Not bad. Interesting structure, filled with many good ideas in terms of belief and little philosophical gems. But as far as a story goes, I never felt any of the characters were fully realized, including the absent main character, nor did the characters ever really feel that distinct from each other despite vast differences written about. All in all, writing the book as separate interviews was interesting in forming the full picture and made for a cool twist, but the splitting of points of view started taking on the expectation of the chronology so it became less intertwined as it went on. Good attempt, but I wouldn’t write home about it. 

Nihon de Update #5: Japan haz ur giant bugs

At the moment, an island version of Alphaville’s Forever Young is playing (think Napoleon Dynomite). We’ve also heard Paul Simon’s the Boxer and MJ’s Beat It plucked on three little resonant strings. I’m amazed we found an internet cafe on this tiny little island of Ishigaki, further south than Okinawa, a skip away from Taiwan. No one here speaks english. No one.

In fact, on our way down here this morning, a three-foot tall japanese lady insisted on asking us over and over again in japanese for bus instructions despite fully understanding that we didn:t speak japanese. Her size and the size of the spacebar on this wacky keyboard is in sharp contrast to the three-times size of all the insects in this country. Apparently relative size is something doled out from a master bag of proportionality.

Anyhow, here we are after five days in Kyushu (japan’s southernmost mainland island). Five days covering 8 mountains, 5 temples nestled in those mountains, 160 kilometers, about 5km total vertical elevation, all on bicycles or on foot through some incredible countryside. Grizzly Peak, you will be our bitch. Legs arent even sore anymore, probably due to the nightly trips to bathhouses. Our guide was a lovable lunatic and deserves far more than an email to explain him. He did it all with construction boots and a 5 inch piece of titanium in his shoulder that was placed there in August after a bad bicycle crash, and which will be removed in another 5 days. We could hardly bitch about the inclines since he did it with a pink bow locking one arm to his chest, while still carrying a pack on the good shoulder. In 5 minutes Joe (goofy white guy from Homer Alaska) could have the business card of any little japanese girl he saw. Still, I cannot believe what "trails" we followed him up.

So here we are on this subtropical island. Out our hotel window is Kabira bay, one of two places in the world where they cultivate black pearls, surrounded by mangrove groves whose thick twisted above-ground roots look like they’re sucking the magma right from the pale blue ocean’s core without any bashfulness. Between the mangroves and black pearl farms is the largest reef of blue coral in the world, but thats been kinda tough to appreciate since i think we’ve been in the middle of a typhoon for the past 24 hours, despite the laughter of our hostess when i say "typhoon des ne?" stupid americans.

But the rain appears to be stopping, and yes, its time for another beer.

Nihon de Update #4: Killer beez haz ur buzzz

Nihon de Update #3: An Amerika-jin desu

Nihon de Update #2: Kyoto haz ur illushuns

Nihon de update #1: Konnichiwa bitches

All is splendid in the land of the rising sun. Angie & I hooked up with our jet-setting friend Zach
when we got here, had some drinks, some gyoza and soup, and passed
out…then woke up at 5am and hit the Tsukiji fish market (might as
well when we were jet-lagged anyway). It was everything you can hope
it can be. We ate fish that might have been still breathing. Oh man.

A little market-going, scampered around electric town (memory cards
are dirt cheap) said goodbye to zach, lunched at this crazy delicious
tempura bar, and trained to the outskirts to visit the ghibli museum
which is a wacked out animated fantasy wonderland. the we passed the
fuck out. way early. oh yeah. also, the subway map that looks like a
ball of yarn…best subway in the world.

now to some tea…

also, as you can see, i havent found the apostrophe on this
newfangled japanese keyboard.

who needs an apostrophe when you have squiggles everywhere anyway.
tomorrow we:re off to the
monastery…

shitsureishimasu,
s