metaphors

Iraq / abandonment / fathers / metaphors / photography / story ideas — No Comments
22
Feb 10

You Blow Stuff Up

Before my dad disappeared to sail around the world when I was 11, I spent every other weekend with him. All he wanted to watch was war movies. I HATED war movies — I was a little girl. A girly-girl. Before my world exploded.

Now, all I watch is war footage — documentaries, YouTube videos, movies about Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s because I’m completing a pilot about Iraq — and thinking about turning the pilot’s cut file into a feature. But the fact remains, that I’m watching my dad’s movies now. I am awake to symmetries in my life. Motifs. There are no accidents.

My dad loved watching people blow stuff up. I love watching what happens to people when they get blown up. War thrusts our worst inwards outward. I am compelled by people losing that much, that quickly.

I posted this story on Twitter a few days ago, in which Capt. Alexander Allan discusses pictures from his new book Afghanistan: A Tour of Duty. One of his comrades had his leg blown off. His buddies found the leg some time later, wrapped in a sheet. They made sure it wasn’t booby-trapped and took it back to camp. They burned it, manning the fire in shifts. Each took his turn to say goodbye. They let go.

I can’t stop thinking of these soldiers burning the leg. Can’t stop thinking of what I’ve left behind, that needs burning.

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T.V. writing / metaphors / writing — No Comments
5
Feb 10

How I Write: Motifs

I love motifs. If there’s some law where the number of motifs in your story threatens to reverse the chemical ratio of metaphor to action, I’m the person to test it.

A motif is a detail that repeats through a story to draw attention to an idea or theme. The motif can be a word, phrase, color, character, monster, sign, place, image, way of describing something, way of talking, alliteration, simile, character trait, situation, anything. The point is that it repeats. Once it repeats it becomes a trail of breadcrumbs we leave to help the reader or viewer find depth and meaning in our stories. When motifs cross and combine, they reflect and magnify each other, drawing a map that points the audience down paths of allusions, partly inherent in the story and partly supplied by the audience’s experience. This is the theme.

I’ll use my Iraq pilot as an example to show how I use motifs. I decided to introduce a new motif in each act, like a recurring chord in a symphony, that, once introduced, would blend together in the end. Each act’s motif shapes the act, giving it a guiding metaphor to direct the action.

These are the ideas that take root in the imaginations of my characters in each act. They discuss them, they see evidence of them all around themselves, they see parallels to them in their environment, more importantly, they DON’T see parallels to them in their environment. These motifs show up in both subtle and un-subtle ways, as jokes, as images, as plot points, as looping topics of conversation.

Act 1:  Motif: Bloodshed.

Act 2: Motif: University of Texas Cheerleaders.

Act 3: Motif: Missing Humvee and Suicided Soldier.

Act 4: Motif: We Don’t Leave A Man Behind.

Act 5: Motif: Innards.

You don’t have to tell a serious story to use motifs — my sitcom pilot was standard network fare but also very motif-driven. You can bury them beneath the surface or not. What they give you is a deeper, more meaningful, more textural world.

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drama / history / journalism / metaphors / story ideas — No Comments
30
Aug 09

Why Do You Need Slaves? To Make Handmade Sand

In this fascinating, heartbreaking interview, Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern-Day Slavery, discusses the four years he spent investigating the current condition of slaves around the world.

There are more slaves now than at any other time in human history: 27 million.

Skinner discusses the time in Romania he was offered a young girl with Downs Syndrome and slashes all over her arms as a sexual slave in trade for a used car, as well as being offered sexual-servant children in broad daylight in Port-au-Prince for $100. He talked them down to $50.

History’s worst stories just keep getting told over and over: as writers, our jobs are to find them, bring them to light, and show how they are the same but different.

TM: To go back to the definition: Forced to work against their will with no escape.

BS: Held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. These are people that cannot walk away.

I stumbled upon a fellow in a quarry in Northern India who’d been enslaved his entire life. He had assumed that slavery at birth. His grandfather had taken a debt of 62 cents, and three generations and three slave masters later, the principal had not been paid off one bit. The family was illiterate and innumerate. This fellow, who I call Gonoo — he asked me to protect his identity — was still forced to work, held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.

Since he was a child, he and his family and his children, along with the rest of the enslaved villagers, took huge rocks out of the earth. They pummeled those rocks into gravel for the subgrade of India’s infrastructure, which is the gleaming pride of the Indian elites.

They further pulverized that gravel into silica sand for glass. There’s only one way that you turn a profit off handmade sand, and that’s through slavery.

via There Are More Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet.

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abandonment / metaphors / story ideas — No Comments
24
Aug 09

Uncrowded House

An abandoned and overgrown house in Detroit.

An abandoned and overgrown house in Detroit.

Abandonment is viscerally compelling for me: I’ll let my inner child do a guest post to explain why soon. Luckily, there’s a new Internet trend to catalogue abandonment in all its forms, from objects to places to … other. I love it: these photos inspire so many stories, so many metaphors. You think of who left and who was left, who has furtively moved in, who will get caught being there, who will possibly come back. These are settings for revisited childhoods, post-apocalyptic futures, worst case scenarios that have actually occurred. And yet there’s hope here too: after all, these houses have gorgeously reverted to nature. Where I’m from in Georgia, you see many old ramshackle places like this out in the country overtaken with kudzu.

Sweet Juniper! is a Detroit blog that does a great job with abandoned places:

Abandoned houses are really no big deal here. Some estimate that there are as many as 10,000 abandoned structures at any given time, and that seems conservative. But for a few beautiful months during the summer, some of these houses become “feral” in every sense: they disappear behind ivy or the untended shrubs and trees planted generations ago to decorate their yards. The wood that framed the rooms gets crushed by trees rooted still in the earth. The burnt lime, sand, gravel, and plaster slowly erode into dust, encouraged by ivy spreading tentacles in its endless search for more sunlight.

Another abandoned "feral" Detroit house.

Another abandoned "feral" Detroit house.

via Sweet Juniper!.

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