the key to career success: suck it often and quickly…

start knocking

OK, this is probably not going to come as big news to many of you.  But the notion that if you want to do something well, you can’t be afraid to fail got by me somehow. I know I’ve heard this before.  Maybe it was a late-night infomercial hosted by some self-help guru. But when you boil it down, strip the idea from the cheesy guy smiling his 1000 kilowatt smile in the darkness of night, there is something to it.

I came to realize this a few weeks ago while I was at a conference for Transmedia storytellers.  For a couple days, I had been running into a guy named Donald Cager.  Donald, humble as pie, introduced himself to me as a producer of commercials.  Little did I know that Donald doesn’t just produce any commercials; he produces some of the biggest spots on TV.  If you watched the Olympics, then you probably saw his Samsung commercial about a thousand times.  I say this because it was this humble, successful guy who finally helped me figure out what I’d been missing.

It’s not uncommon for me to have more than a couple projects on the burner at once.  I just work better that way.  But when starting these things, I always waste a lot of time trying to figure out which of the two I should focus on.  More than once, I have gotten locked up and not started anything because I wanted to know which project would be the better use of time, and as I’ve gotten older, this quandary has gotten more severe.  And with each day at the conference, because I was being exposed to so many approaches, my anxiety about my next steps as a writer was increasing exponentially.

I said this to Donald.  I think I used that staid metaphor of the door.  At the conference, I was exposed to so many doors, so many ways to move forward as a writer.  Not that many of these doors would lead to success.  Most wouldn’t. I knew that.  And that truth was scaring me into paralysis.  But Donald, in his quiet way, turned it around on me.  He basically told me that I needed to open any and every door as quickly as I could.  Because the sooner I went through all the wrong doors, the sooner I’d find the right one.

I love this.  It’s amazing, but just with that little bit of wisdom, I feel so much freer than I have in a very long time.  So why didn’t I listen to those late-night self-help guys sooner?  I think they say the same thing.  Oh, that’s right.  Because they usually suck.  That, and the fact that one bit of wisdom just doesn’t make it worth the pain of looking at those blazing white smiles–made from cheese and cynicism.  I guess you get the lessons you need when you are ready for them.

Thanks, Donald.

no thanks, dude

I’m a shy tonka truck looking for direction…

I know. The title of this post sounds like some lame attempt to be sensitive on Match.com.

But in reality, I’m getting ready to attend a conference for writers, multimedia-gurus and tech know-it-alls.  I’m staying with my folks, which is great for me, because it gives me the chance to say hey to my peeps while also getting the chance to do some networking.  I say this though the truth is that I’m not sure how the whole networking thing is going to go.  I can be kind of shy, but shyness can sometimes creep up on you.  It hides in the day to day of faces that, if not friendly, are at least familiar.  But once you break that pattern up a little bit, there she is, shyness is there, telling you not to say too much to strangers.

I am hopeful there will be a lot of people in attendance at this thing.  I’m kind of odd this way, but I’m not shy in large groups.  But that only goes so far since at some point, I will want to network with people, schmooze, press the flesh, etc..  That is kind of the point of this kind of event.

Or is it?

I’m making things up as I go.  There is a part of me that is unsure why I am going and what I hope to get.  The conference is for Transmedia storytellers, which, as I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, is a term that can have as many meanings as there are weird technical people spewing it out.  But to put it at its simplest, Transmedia is for people who are trying to tell stories over a number of different media.  So you might have one main storyline told in book form, but then you have a spinoff-plot develop in a game or a character might have a Twitter feed and tweet to people who have bought the book or the game.  It gets a lot more complex and a lot more interesting, but at least this gives you an idea.

Regardless, what worries me is that I am changing things up again.  In previous posts, I made the mantra of 9 months and out, but this might just have been bravado masking insecurity.  I’m 40, almost 41.  Most people have their careers set by now, and what am I doing?  Jumping all about, trying things on, seeing where I fit.  Isn’t that what 20-somethings do?  Or 30-somethings—early 30-somethings?

As my 70 year old mom drove me to the train station this morning, I felt a little bit like a fool, like a man-child being dropped off to school.  Those same feelings of insecurity I felt so many years back: will the people I find like me?  Will they think me ridiculous?  Those same feelings are flooding me.  When I was a child, I knew I couldn’t stop time.  I knew I just had to suck it up and go to school, and more times than not, things turned out well.  I hope the same now, except that I know the stakes are a higher.  I don’t have to worry about a bully or a mean girl.  I need something to work out here regarding work.

I’m not looking for someone to give me a job or offer to buy something I’ve written.  I don’t need anything that big.  I’d be fine if I could just find the next step in this process of reinvention.  I think I have the energy for a big push.  I just need to know where to point myself.

Another memory comes to me as I write this.  When I was a kid, that shy, somewhat anxious kid, I used to love this yellow toy truck.  It was one of those toys that you’d have to rev up before letting it go screaming across the kitchen floor.  I am that yellow truck, all revved up, waiting patiently to go speeding somewhere—but where?  That’s the difference.  I’m a self-aware Tonka truck in need of career GPS.

9 Months & Out: Is It Better to Be Open or Focussed When Looking for a New Career?

 

After too much deliberation, I am going to the motherland (Los Angeles where my mother does live, btw) in October, so I can join a lot of other writers/programmers/social media people for what I hope will be a learning experience.  Story World is not cheap, though it is not as expensive as some other professional conferences.  I’d tell you more about what the convention entails except that I’m not sure–not exactly.  The event is for storytellers who want to work across media and incorporate gaming aspects and social media into their narratives.  It’s not really about how to tell stories, as far as I can tell.  It’s more about how to use different media to create new ways to experience stories.

Apart from that, I imagine there will be a lot of trading of the biz cards.

In general, I’m of two minds about conferences. One part of me thinks they are a waste of time and money. I’ve gone to a couple for writers.  And it was fun to be around other members of the tribe, but I didn’t really get anything out of them, professionally or artistically.  How many times can you attend workshops like, “How to Sell Your Novel” or “How to get an Editor’s Attention”?  If it were all so easy, then there would be as many bad books published as there are crazy people writing them.

I’m hopeful that since Story World has a more technical component to it that the workshops will be a little more useful.  I also hope that since this kind of storytelling is mor collaborative than book writing that networking will be fruitful.

Still, I have my concerns.  If writer conferences are just a little too closed, a little too predictable, this kind of conference might be a little too open.  Story World is about new media and new media is so new and untested that it’s hard to know crazy from brilliant.  I think I can tell when a writer is being crazy: that 3,000 page tome about identity with detailed disembodied descriptions of the emotional lint is probably going to never see the light of day.  But who’s to say that some app that allows a person to put on goggles and see that lint for himself will not be the next great thing?

There’s an analog to my career quest. A year ago, I decided I would not pigeon hole myself about the kind of writer I would try to be.  I had tried to write a novel for 6 years because without much thought, I concluded that the novel was the only way to go as a writer.  But then I realized I had other interests: film, graphic novels, blogs, children’s books.  Hell, I even thought about trying to write for video games, which I still think would be frickin’ awesome.  Trying my hand at many different types of writing since then has freed me up enormously, and I think it has made me better.  I learned that I love to collaborate, that in the end, if I do get a book out and if it were to be read by any amount of people that I’d love that book to be a children’s book–one of those children’s books that adults could read, too.  But I also learned that I love to tell stories more than I love to write fiction books of a certain kind for a certain reader in a certain format known as a book.

Of course, there’s a downside to all of this: namely, it can leave you a little directionless, as with Story World, all this possibility leaves me not sure if what I’m producing is crazy crap or crazy good, or worse yet, not crazy enough to be either good or bad.

So, in October, I’m going to a conference to learn what I don’t know.  Am I a fool?  Maybe.  But maybe, that’s all you can do when you’re starting out on a new path.  Keep taking steps and hoping that if you drop enough business cards along the way, someone will find you and tell you where home is.

cause it’s hard out here for a p…, i mean, reader

It’s a chilly night here in San Francisco, and I spent the evening catching up on some good old blogging-goodness.  Specifically, I came across a lovely post at Blood Ink Diary about books, owning them, reading them, not lending them–basically, loving them.  So if you love books, too,  I suggest you read the post.

As for me, I should’ve just enjoyed the prose and the message.  But I often do not do what I should do, and as I snuggled against my fleece blanket (I think San Francisco thinks it’s in the southern hemisphere), and read the post, I felt a shiver that was not caused by the fact that I live in a town that summer forgot.  Part shame, part remembrance of things lost would be the best way to describe what I was feeling.  The first because at some point as I’ve tried to write and write and get that writing out there, I’ve forgotten the power of great words, of slow-moving words for words’ sake.  It’s been months that I’ve read a book for joy.  A good half-year since I’ve read a long work of fiction.  Why?  It’s like I’ve become some kind of puritan who pooh-poohs the novel for its lack of “usefulness”.  Sure, my pilgrim brethren didn’t read books about branding and social media campaigns instead of reading fiction, but they dismissed the novel and the poem because they could not see the point to reading anything that didn’t build the soul–aka, scriptures.  Idle hands are bad enough, but an idle mind taking in words over the novel-version of the boob-tube, that was just too much.

It’s cliche, and I’ve already said a million times in this blog, but the Catch-22 of loving words enough that you actually want to string some along in new and weird ways for some imagined group of readers demands that you not do that creating very often.  It demands that you do a lot of selling, of yourself, of your concepts, and maybe, your body, which wouldn’t be bad except that I’m married–sorry ladies.

It’s an impossible situation.  That’s right, Joseph Heller, your little war book is nothing compared to the dilemma of the modern writer.  I was going to say that we writers trade our creative time for money so that we can write more words.  But the truth is that it’s not only the time; it’s also the head space.  To create, to dig the foundation of our imaginary worlds, one has to be kind of pure-minded.  You gotta be focused on the story, not on what that book might do for your wallet after it’s done.

I think that’s why the post I referred to above shamed me a little bit.  Its author is devoted to the words inside all those lovely books on her shelf.  She doesn’t care if they are useful or practical or if they fit the world and its ideas about utility.  A great book focuses the mind, and if you allow me a moment of operatic hyperbole, it focuses the soul.  The same is true of the writing process, of course.  And that’s what I have to remind myself of.  No matter what happens with career or my lack thereof, I cannot forget.  I cannot.

using blogging to let out the inner-party clown OR Ryan Holiday, you sad, sad man!

i’m not ryan seacrest, nor am i ryan anything!!!

As I mentioned in a previous post, this week I’m reading Ryan Holiday‘s book about manipulating social media for personal gain. I’m still not sure why I’m reading this. I’m too riddled by Catholic guilt or a strange sense of integrity to think I would actually implement some of what the author has done.  I’m just not a gamer of systems.  I make money teaching, for God’s sake, so you know I’m not that savvy.  But I guess I want to better understand this system that any of us creatives have to play (at least a little) in order to get our stuff out into the world.

That said, I think Mr. Holiday might have gamed me.  In interviews, I’ve heard him say he gives away his secrets in the book, but apart from a few general examples, he doesn’t give many details.  He does repeat himself over and over again about how bad the blog-centric world of social media is and how easy it is to manipulate it.  After 250 pages, I can say that my biggest lesson from Ryan Holiday is that he is a sad man and makes his living doing sad things that even he feels bad (and sad) about.  He feels badly, he tells us, though not bad enough that he’s going to stop doing said sad things.  BTW, if you know nothing about Ryan Holiday, he’s the guy responsible for those American Apparel ad campaigns that verge on kiddy-porn.  You know the ones.  Middle-aged men tend to congregate around them at bus stops–maybe that will give you some context as to who this guy is.

So, now, 250 pages later, $9.99 poorer, I’m still wondering about blogging.  Specifically, why I’m doing it.  What secret hopes do I have for what I write, if any.  I enjoy posting.  Let me get that out of the way.  I have some really great bloggers reading me, and whenever I get onto this pragmatic talk about utility, they always remind me that blogging should be for fun and done for the sake of fun.  I agree. I certainly don’t think blogging is my way to fame as a writer. But still, I can’t deny that I’d like to express myself to more readers. But I want the writing to be honest and I want my concerns when writing to reflect writerly craft, not the need for page views. Ryan Holiday would say that’s a fool’s errand.  Well, whatev, Ryan.  I didn’t ask you.

I did, however, ask bloggers why they wrote, and Friday Jones, a reader of my last post and a blogger in her own right, left an amazing comment.  I will quote it here:

I have been wondering the same thing, but I think you as a blogger need to understand the purpose of your blog. For instance my blog is literally about me airing all of the dirty laundry of my life out as I tread the road of self discovery. It is an all over the place blog with a central focus. However what if you are like the the Ryan Seacrest of the boggersphere? Your topics would be broad and vast. If you as a blogger have the ability to let your personality shine through, then you are selling you as a brand versus a you as an expert on a limited subject. But if your personality get’s lost, then being “all over” will not serve you in the long run.

Friday Jones, you are a genius.  I’m no Ryan Seacrest, nor am I a Ryan Holiday.  (I don’t even really like the name Ryan unless it’s for a girl or a last name–just another issue of mine.)  But I think I let my personality show through.  And maybe that’s part of why I want to blog.  I’m like that shy guy in the corner at a party who wants to join in but is too shy.  Blogging lets me let my inner-party clown out.

What about you?  What does blogging do for you?  And do you all care about getting readers?  And if so, what would you be willing to do to get those eyeballs?

should a blog be focussed or should it be all over the place?

I’ve been reading Ryan Holiday‘s book, Trust Me, I’m Lying, and let me tell you, the experience is depressing.  In the book, Mr, Holiday not only talks about how he’s manipulated the media countless times, he also argues over and over again that the world of social media is not based on value or truth or quality writing; it’s based on tricking readers to view more pages.  It’s worth noting that as I read this book, I started to wonder if I was part of some kind of meta-experience set up by the author.  I wondered if the book itself was just a trick in that it repeated the same basic point over and over again.  Was my buying the book–a book that promises to describe in full detail the ins and outs of the media landscape–a trick?

But the most depressing part of reading this book has more to do with where I am than where the book or its author is.  I heard Mr. Holiday interviewed on Brian Lehrer‘s public radio show, and I bought his book because he said that in it, he would give away the tools of his trade. In other words, he would teach his readers how to manipulate social media.  I’m not saying that I wanted to do anything dishonest, but I was hoping to learn something I hadn’t known before–some trick of the trade that would help my blog, my career as a writer.  Kind of sad and lame, I’ll admit.

The only thing I really learned from the book is to ask this question of myself an of all of you bloggers out there.  Mr. Holiday repeatedly quotes big-time bloggers all saying the same thing: focus on one thing and become an authority on that one thing if you want people to come read you.  As a generalist, this troubles me, but at the same time, it stands to reason.  People like to know what they are getting, so if they want spots, they go to that blog or channel or whatever, and likewise, they want to know about food or clothes or relationships.  Blogs, so Mr. Holiday argues, are all about consistency.  That sells, by which he means, that’s what readers want.  Is that so?

What do you all think?  Do you care if people read or if they comment? Do you write for yourself or are you trying to get your stuff read by as many people as possible? Do you force yourself to post about a limited amount of topics or are you all over the place?

i’m a loser, i’m a genius, i’m a loser: a writer’s dilemma

It’s a sign of age that things are not one extreme or the other. When I was younger, if I failed at something,  I would almost certainly tell people I sucked.  I didn’t mean, I suck at this or that.  I was trying to make more of an existential statement, as in I am a person who just lives in a state of sucking, i.e., a loser.

I was never so confident or clueless to say I was a genius when something went my way.  But I’ll admit that somewhere in the back of my head, I was hopeful I might find that thing I was amazing at. If I’m really honest, I’d add that I wanted to find something I was amazing at without having to put in bone-crushing effort needed to make amazingness.  Of course, even geniuses put in effort–I’m assuming this though I cannot say for sure since, if you haven’t figured it out on your own, I am no genius.  (I know. Big surprise.)

I bring all of this up because a couple weeks ago, I experienced a pretty big failure and a nice success back to back.  The first was a screening of my second short film (the trailer appears above).  The screening happened here in SF at a big theater as part of a festival that happens out here regularly.  As part of the festival, after the screening of each movie is over, the crew and cast go down in front and take questions.  Often the questions are pretty slight, i.e., why did you you use that logo for your production company; do you think you’ll make a sequel to that romantic comedy with the happy ending that couldn’t possibly go anywhere else because it is a short with a happy ending; I love chocolate, and the main character was eating some in that one scene, what kind of chocolate?  You get the point.

But when Cherise, my strange little Cinderella story in reverse, was done, it was like ghost town silence.  We went up and looked out into the vast audience (over 600 people) and you could feel the rampant indifference. What I would’ve given for a question about chocolate?

On later reflection and because my director reminded me of this, I realized that we made the movie we set out to make.  We wanted to make something that was lovely to look at.  We wanted to tell a story with dance and music and through minimal dialogue. We wanted a visual experience more than we cared about story.  Well, we hit those marks.  But still, there was a part of me sitting in that theater harkening back to my younger days, the younger me that often told himself, Jesus, dude, you suck the big one.

A day later, I had a reading. It was the first time I’ve ever been asked to be a featured reader, and I was excited.  But there was also a part of me that was fearful.  Would I suck at this, too?  Would the crowd, mostly poets, look at me and my little fables/fairy tales/ urban micro fiction about old ladies popping happy pills and would they reject what they saw? Would they get all aggro the way poets at spoken word events often do?  What is the opposite of snapping fingers and saying, groovy, man? As it happens, they did not hate me.  In fact, they were very enthusiastic. Some people might have even  snapped some fingers.  And for a moment or two that night, I felt like like I had arrived. I was a writer.

I’m no genius. That thought never crossed my mind even with the snapping, but I’m ok with that. The violins will never soar as I write the great American Novel. I’m no Mozart.  I’m not even Salieri. But with practice, I hope I write something that gets close to great. That’s a realistic goal–I hope it is.

As for the sucking part, the truth is I know I don’t suck, either–not in existential way.  But ironically, that’s almost more disappointing than not being a genius.  If you tell people you suck and you believe it, there’s always a way up.  There’s always room for improvement. And more importantly, if you fail at what you’re attempting, you can wrap yourself in the Sucky Blanket of Low Expectations.

You think I sucked that night?  You think my movie was shite?  Well, of course my dear man/woman, I suck.  I suck the big one.

NO MORE!  It’s time to grow the hell up. I’m just too old to be carrying the Sucky Blanket around. I need to work and not worry. I might die with nothing to my artistic record, but I’m not going down sucking, goddammit.

 

the Batman shootings: evil, revenge, and me

I don’t usually post on Fridays, but I just saw some footage from the Colorado shooting, and I wanted to write something. I needed to.

I will admit that about the same time James Holmes decided to enter a theater in Colorado guns a’blazing, I was watching a Korean revenge film about  sociopath and about a cop who decides to break all the rules in order to seek revenge.  Usually, revenge movies are a guilty pleasure for me, and Asian revenge movies are so over the top that I wouldn’t ever say I am moved by them intellectually.  But this Korean movie, called, I Saw the Devil, was different.  It was over the top and sometimes, the characterization of the sociopath was akin to those old silent movies when the villain wears black and twists his mustache, but the thing that kind of made me stick with the movie was that it focused less on the criminal than it did on the police officer.  If I had to summarize the movie, I’d say it was a look at the fact that there is no solution for evil, or if you prefer, against a person completely devoid of morality.

Ironically, this movie reminded me of The Dark Knight, which also dealt with the same notion.  Heath Ledger as the Joker, you say what you will about his acting, but that character is truly horrifying–not because of what he does, but because he feels nothing about what he does.  You can imagine that the Joker would give as much thought to breathing as he would to brutally killing a person except that brutally killing someone probably gave him some pleasure–but then again, maybe not.

There’s a scene in The Dark Knight when the Joker talks to Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and lays out his thoughts on violence.  Watch this scene and tell me if this isn’t scary.

It’s scary because there is no ideology, no firm ground to share. There is only randomness, violence. It makes me shiver, and yet as a movie-goer, I’m drawn to it because there is something awesome about it–awesome in the Biblical sense of the word.  Awesome in the sense of being awestruck with horror because there is nothing one can do to fix this kind of person.  Revenge is not a prudent motivating force, but part of the reason we like revenge movies is that they restore order to the world–at least they attempt to.  They give us a sense of justice.  But the randomness of the Joker, the randomness of this shooter in Colorado, is just that, randomness.  And revenge does not bring about justice.  The immoral person does not feel, cannot feel, guilt, which is kind of the point of seeking out justice, isn’t it?  That’s the lesson of The Dark Knight and I Saw the Devil.

And yet, the answer is not apathy.

Earlier this week, right outside the projects in which I teach my GED classes, there was a drive-by shooting.

this does not look like the site of evil, does it?

No one was hit, though there were dozens of children at the playground across the street and young couples with their dogs were there, too.  The shooters, no doubt, are not evil, even if what they were doing could be called that.  They were not being random.  They were going after a kid for some reason no one knows exactly.  The only reason I bring this event up, apart from the fact that I have not really talked to anyone about it, is that the responses of my young students was almost all the same: indifference. The shooting, the bullets and all the harm those bullets can do, has been internalized by the young people I work with, and they don’t see much point in getting upset by it.  I don’t think my kids are evil for their apathy.  But I do think it shows that they have been harmed by the evil I’m describing.  They do not feel.  They don’t imagine that there are places where random violence is not a daily thing to witness.  Or maybe they do, but they don’t see themselves living in those places.

And maybe they have no reason to. I’m not sure I believe in the devil, at least not as certain religious people like to describe him, but if he did exist, last night, a little bit of hell was visited upon the town of Aurora, Colorado and those people in that theater saw a glimpse of the devil for themselves.

genius is like porn: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it….

Recently, I heard an interview between Fiona Apple and Marc Maron.  It was on the WTF podcast, which I recommend listening to if you are interested in Apple or if you aren’t familiar with Marc Maron as an interviewer. I was excited to hear the talk because I love Apple’s music.  Well, I’m not sure I always love the music, but I’m always excited about her albums because I think Apple is a genius.

That word gets overused.  There are very few geniuses.  I tend to think of them the way one should think of a Pegasus. As in you’re walking down some country road and over to the left, you see a pasture and some horses race by.  If you’ve ever seen horses run, not being ridden but just running, then you probably know that the sight is awe-inspiring.  Horses are beautiful animals.  The power, the speed, the grace.  But these animals, as amazing as they are, are not geniuses.  The genius is the white horse running in the opposite direction from the rest of the pack.  The one with the wings.  The one that now is flying toward you.  Jesus, you’re thinking, horses don’t do that.  You might be scared at seeing this.  You might want to get up close and touch this crazy horse.  Maybe you want to do both at once.

Well, damn skippy!!!  Your reaction is natural.  Horses don’t fly.  Neither do writers nor singers nor painters nor fill-in-the-blank.  But occasionally one of these people does the impossible.  That’s the genius.

Listening to Apple sing makes me feel like I’m seeing a Pegasus.  Again, I’m not always loving the music.  But I want to understand it.  I want to know how/why a thirty-something singer gets away with putting out an album with a title that’s got so many words that you have to use an elipsis.  (The most recent title is The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do)  Is it pretentious? You might want to say so but I’m not sure.  Mind you, this is an album that has a song on it called Hot Butter, which I kid you not is a pop song that uses kettle drum, piano, and voices in counter-point.  How does Apple pull this off?  How is this not some kind of crazy art song?  How is this song popular enough that it plays on a Starbucks speaker system, which is how I first heard it?

It’s the power of genius, my friends.  You might not like the song, you might not like her music, but you know that Fiona Apple has wings.

a question for writers of fiction everywhere….

whoa, dude. stopping bullets with my mind is so cool…

OK here it goes, writer-peeps.  I have a craft question for you.  I put a variation of this question to the great Marc Schuster of Abominations fame, but I thought I’d put a generalized version out to the general population of writers.  So here it is: what do you do when you’re writing a story that is set in a world that doesn’t follow the same rules that our world does?  How do you craft the story so that you don’t end up putting tons and tons of exposition in the mouths of your character or bog your plot down with development stuff that is necessary though painful to read?

I could give some literary examples, but since that would cause me to bog this post down with a lot of detail about books that you might not have read, let me give an example from the movies.  I will admit that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for the first Matrix movie, but man, oh man, I liked that flick.  Even if you don’t agree, I think it’s pretty hard to argue with the fact that the first movie sketched out a strange new world–sketch being the opportune word.  The first Matrix movie gives you just enough facts that you can follow the plot.  You might have questions about how or why, but the movie keeps you going and when it ends, you either think, in classic Keanu-manner, that what you just saw was frickin’ cool or you don’t.  But you can’t punch too many holes in the premise because the premise only had to be developed enough to get you through the two hours.

And then…and then, the directors got greedy or maybe they got artistic.  And they decided to come back and make the world make sense in another couple installments for a novelistic seven hours of film.  And that, my friends, is where it all started going to pot.  To keep the plot aloft, the writers had to come up with a lot of hot air–yes, I mean, the story-telling equivalent of flatulence, a veritable stinky mess of poop-connoting gas.  Not only was the plot dumb, it was also dished out in densely written scenes that made the plot stop and start like…like a bad night on the toilet.

(I will cease the potty-stuff going forward because I sense you are all getting fed up and because I think I’ve made my point.)

Look, I’m not just a critic.  I’m a participant in this crap-style of story development.  The third issue of my graphic novel, Ostenspieler and the Book of Faces (coming soon) is all flashback and explanation.  I managed to create a pretty decent story line set in a world different from our own over the first two issues, but in order to set up the fourth and final issue, I had to bog that third issue down with info–yes, hot-air, flatular junk.

Has anyone come across this problem?  Does anyone have some examples of writers who avoided the “fill-in’the-gaps type of plotting?

In other words, HELP!!!!!!!