Chris Csont

Trying

My daughter isn’t two weeks old yet, so sometimes she doesn’t want to sleep at night. When I go take my turn trying to console the angry little tomato while my wife gets an hour or three of rest, I know that there is one thing I cannot do that would calm this child down: lactate.

She’s hungry, I can’t feed her, and there’s nothing I can do to stop the wailing and gnashing of gums.

But I have to try and calm her down.

Sometimes I get a moment where she stops crying to burp. Sometimes she’ll even sleep for minutes or (right now I can’t believe this is happening) an hour. Or sometimes she’ll still be bright red but will stop gasping and protesting long enough to take a few good breaths. All of those belong in the win column, even if they don’t mean I get to go to sleep quite yet.

When I sit down to work on yet another draft of something, I try not to think that this will be the time I fix all the problems. It probably won’t. I may not even fix a single problem, and actually create five new ones.

But I have to try and put words on the page.

If I go in with the enthusiasm that this time will be different, and this time will make everything perfect, I’m setting myself up for disappointment. But if I believe that I might not make any real progress and can still push ahead, that sets me up to feel like I at least accomplished the attempt. That I can mark off one more day in the chain of trying.

The Hagakure talks about how a retainer should go into battle believing they are already dead so that they do not act as if they fear death. This is maybe a little morbid of a working motto to attach oneself to.

Brian Eno has a more moderate line:

“The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.”

It’s a quote I keep up on the wall to remind me that not every day will have an epiphany. Not every run will be a personal best. And now I need to remember that every silly song or diaper check will not necessarily be the thing that calms the ferocious infant.

But that shouldn’t stop me from trying.

Baby Steps

My wife was in her second trimester when we received the notice that our rent would be increased (again). It was time to move, even if she wouldn’t be able to help with the heavy lifting. While we were fortunate to find a better apartment quickly, there was still a catch: They wouldn’t wait until our current lease was up and we’d need to pay a month of double rent.

In an effort to control costs, and to try to turn a series of negatives into a positive, we decided that I’d try to move the majority of our stuff slowly, over the course of that month, using our Honda Fit.

And so it began. A little at a time. One or two car loads a day, day after mercifully mild August day. On a single trip down the three flights of stairs to the car, carrying a box of random kitchen gadgets or a lamp, it would feel like the task was never going to get done. The Honda Fit may be aptly named (especially when you fold down the back seat), but we had accumulated a lot of things over the last five years of living together, along with the new things for our family-member-to-be.

Any time I wasn’t busy schlepping was earmarked for working on the last sprint of a script draft. This schedule didn’t offer a chance for many uninterrupted writing days. I would get an hour here, maybe 20 minutes one day. If I completed a scene, it was a victory.

The friction was greater in both situations, because every day I’d have to go through the process of convincing myself to get started, even though I knew I wouldn’t have the time or energy to do all that much that day. I knew that to fill up the car one time, I’d need to make 10-15 trips up and down those stairs. I knew that the distance to “Fade Out.” was still a long ways away even if I saw a good daily bump in my page count.

But the jobs got done. Friction can work in your favor, too, like erosion. A persistent chipping away at a massive project produces more results than inaction. Sometimes your sense of how well your work is going doesn’t matter so long as you keep at it. You’re too close, too stressed, too scattered, or too… anything, really. You don’t always know what you’re capable of until it’s done.

And it starts this way for all of us. Learning to walk. Learning to speak. Learning to breathe. Even before we know we’re working towards something larger, we’re taking small steps.

It’s easy to forget that. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the fear of missing out, or the fear of moving too slowly. While on my way to teach the other day, I saw an investment company advertisement with a picture of a baby which seemed to scream at commuters: “If your baby is already born and you haven’t saved enough for their college education, you’re a failure, and they will be, too.” It’s a message designed to reinforce the idea that it’s impossible to keep up with life, but you should still break yourself trying.

Right now I’m working on taking satisfaction from finishing what I start. Setting goals and making progress toward them, even if it may not move as fast as I want. I’m working on taking satisfaction from the doing. If I can do that, then the friction of moving in smaller increments could become the joy of persistent meaningful effort.

It just may take a little longer than I expect it to.

Run in the Rain

Don’t check the weather to see if tomorrow might be nicer outside. Lace up your shoes. Cut through the grass and feel the soft, wet earth cushion your stride. Run through puddles. Hop over puddles. Let the rain cool you off as you push forward.

Don’t worry about not using your headphones or electronics. Listen to the sound of your feet against the pavement. See how quiet you can make yourself. Listen to the patter of droplets falling through the leaves above you. Smell the flowers.

So many things we want to do wind up not getting done because the conditions aren’t right, or we don’t think we’re prepared enough.

You can’t always change the environment to exactly suit your needs, but you are always capable of not caring if things are perfect.

Godzilla, Godzilla, And My Dad

When I was young, my dad introduced me to a lot of older sci-fi and horror movies. Films like Frankenstein, Godzilla, and Them! Being the little guy I was, some things scared me. Giant bugs, for example, were particularly freaky for me.

And that’s when these movies became a teachable moment.

My dad would talk to me about what the people making the movies were afraid of. In these three examples, there is the common undertone of the fear of science gone out of control; of the consequences of man trying to play God and master the forces of the natural world. This changed how I looked at stories, even from that early age.

And that’s how I approached the new Godzilla. Sure, I went to a screening on the biggest screen I could find and sat almost uncomfortably close (because I’m not a complete unfeeling, analytical film droid. I like explosions.), but I also knew that the original Godzilla has a special place in my film-loving heart. It’s allegory about the perils of the nuclear age and the terrible responsibilities of those who pursue scientific knowledge was part of the Rosetta Stone of my movie-going life.

As the credits rolled, I sat for a moment and thought about what was beneath the surface of this movie. If the original was about the awesome fear of annihilation by our own hand, what was this new vision representative of?

I thought about the shots comparing the scale of objects, and toying with the audience’s perceptions. A roach climbing over a toy tank. Ford holding a small action figure of a soldier that kinda, sorta resembles him. A close up shot of a lizard, followed by soldiers moving behind it, towering over it. And then comparing these moments to the shots of humans the size of pinpoints being washed away by tidal waves, or smashed or dropped from great heights. Or the shots from a human point of view showing pieces of the mammoth beasts, obscuring their full size because they’re just too big to be taken in at once.

And I thought about the moments where the creatures seem to directly interact with the humans. There are few. These aren’t monsters maliciously stomping on buildings or eating people. We’re not even important enough to be their food source (they prefer radiation). There are a few moments when Godzilla himself seems to make eye contact with a human, but it’s implied by all the previous moments that it’s not really contact, but maybe a form of curiosity. The way that a human might look at a small bird, or try to understand the actions of a swarm of insects.

We are not the biggest force in our ecosystem. We, too, are small.

The movie further reinforces this idea with the actual actions of the humans, and how any action they take only makes things worse. Humans accidentally excavated the MUTO creatures from their dormant hiding place underground. Humans created the nuclear resources that give the MUTO a food supply that was no longer a natural part of the ecosystem. Humans moved a MUTO cocoon to a site of nuclear waste disposal, setting up more carnage when what was in that cocoon awakened. Humans attempted to set up a nuclear warhead to destroy the creatures, but in doing so accidentally created a situation where they needed to deactivate that same warhead when the creatures took it to use as an incubator for their young.

We are small. Our actions are insignificant to these larger creatures. We are hopeless against them and must trust that they will strike a balance that doesn’t destroy us in the process.

At this point, my mind shifted to Pacific Rim, another movie in the kaiju tradition. While there is a moment in the opening narration of this movie that seems to mimic Godzilla (2014), where humans need to use multiple nuclear weapons to bring down a single kaiju monster, the movie quickly diverges to a more optimistic message.

Together we are strong. Together, we can become as big and strong as the challenges we face and topple them. The movie reinforces this theme time and again, from requiring a team of pilots in each towering jaeger robot to highlighting the way that isolationist strategies (like the building of defensive walls) are inadequate.

There are other important differences (for example, the kaiju of Pacific Rim are intentionally malicious towards humans and are sent by an invading force as exterminators), but this difference in underlying theme and dramatic purpose is what I kept thinking about. Pacific Rim was about characters learning to work together and sacrifice together in order to protect humanity as a whole. Godzilla (2014) is about humanity realizing it is at the mercy of forces out of its control, and our best option may be to move to Kansas.

And then I think about Dr. Serizawa from the original Godzilla, and how he not only makes the Oxygen Destroyer weapon that ultimately kills Godzilla, but how he sacrifices himself in triggering the weapon to make sure that the secret of his powerful weapon dies with him. It supports the theme of the film that scientific progress can produce things of benefit, but that they can also be used for terrible purposes. The Oxygen Destroyer stops a rampaging monster, but it could have been used to cause even more devastation than the monster itself.

Take this a step further: In the American dubbing, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the suggestion is that Dr. Serizawa dies with the weapon so that it doesn’t fall into “the wrong hands.” In the original, there are no right hands for a weapon of this power, and Dr. Serizawa believes it is too great a power to be wielded by any human. For an American audience, already entrenched in a Cold War and aware that it recently deployed the fearful atomic weapons that spawned Godzilla, this change shifts the theme to a have your cake and eat it to philosophy that man can create great and terrible weapons that should not exist, but if they do exist, let’s all agree that we know who should wield them.

Putting it all together, this new Godzilla is all about feeling small, weak, and powerless in the face of something ancient and unexplainable. Something natural. Something with as much interest in us as a hurricane or an earthquake does. And there’s nothing we can do about it but surrender.

Except for one thing.

Ford Brody: Indestructible Action Figure

This new Godzilla owes several things to the American dubbing of the original. For one, there’s an American point of view character who just happens to be present for every important moment. In Godzilla, King of the Monsters! this was done by filming new scenes with Raymond Burr and having lots of shots of him looking at things or having an interpreter explain things to him. It’s a clumsy device, but it helped to ground the story for an American audience that distributors thought would be averse to subtitles.

Godzilla (2014) is less clumsy in how it motivates the reasons why Ford is always in the center of the action. He’s at the site of the first monster event because his father lead him there. The second event happens midway between home and Japan, following the path of the monsters. And finally, he volunteers for a mission to try and stop the monsters because it’s the only way to quickly get back to his wife and son. So far, so good.

But in order to balance his ability to act as the audience’s point of identification while also keeping his story engaging, the film puts him in life threatening danger at regular intervals. And he always walks away. After being almost thrown from a train, knocked off a suspension bridge, and being thrown forward by a gas explosion, he winds up with a single crutch and a few scrapes and bruises that fail to suggest that he spent the last 48 hours in a constant struggle for his life.

Because he needs to end the movie kissing the also lightly scraped and mussed Elle Brody, and everybody should look Apocalypse Pretty for that moment… But that’s another train of thought.

By making Ford so indestructible, the movie undercuts it’s own message. “Humanity needs to reconsider its place in the food chain, except for this guy.”

And expand on this to look at a recurring image throughout the movie: families separating and reuniting. If the movie focuses on a family being separated, that family makes it out OK in the end. Every time.

“Humanity needs to reconsider its place in the food chain, except for this one guy… And his family… And any other family we focus on.”

The movie creates a sense that some people are safe by virtue of them having loved ones they are separated from. It undercuts its sense of fear and chaos by suggesting an ordered world that dulls the audience’s sense of pain.

Compare this to Pacific Rim, where not only do characters die, but characters we care about. Their death, and willingness to face it, helps define them. Or the original Godzilla, where time is spent focusing on a woman and her children about to be crushed by the terrible beast.

The woman gathers her children to her and tells them not to be afraid, because they’ll soon be with their father. And we weep for them, because in that one moment we identify with them. Their death has meaning because it touches us. The film focuses on them not to make us feel safe and comforted, but to advance the film’s theme about the horrors of the forces humanity has unleashed, and the human toll.

There are no such moments in the new Godzilla. Humans are either viewed from afar like ants under a boot or focused on so we can feel their relief at having survived.

There’s another thing I learned about watching movies with my dad: skepticism with humor. We were our own Mystery Science Theater for plenty of movies in his collection of 50s and 60s sci-fi movies. A lot of it focused on the rickety and obvious craftsmanship of those movies. Spotting the wires. Recognizing a costume from another movie. Pointing out where you could see the breaks in the illusion.

That had an influence on me, too, but not as quickly. It kept me always thinking about how these are created stories. They don’t just happen. Everything that happens is a choice, successful or otherwise.

Maybe now I snark a little less while watching the movie. A little. But a lot of how I learned to watch movies comes from those days spent on the couch with my dad and his VHS collection.

So when I sit down to watch Godzilla, I think about watching those other movies with him. And I think about how in the near future I’m going to have somebody new to the world to share these things with. I doubt I’ll make them sit through Robot Monster 3D, but at some point they’ll meet Godzilla. And maybe their dad will calm their fears by telling them about why these monsters on the screen exist.

It’s because the people making these movies are scared, too. But we can be a little less scared if we know we’re not alone in our fear.

Take Out The I

Why are you writing what you’re writing?

Is it to try and win a contest or a fellowship? Is it to get a good grade in a class? Is it to try and catch the eye of an agent or manager? Is it to impress the other people in your workshop?

These reasons all play into the idea of writing with an eye toward who your audience is, but they also can feed into your ego. This can lead down the dangerous path of tying your self worth to what you put on the page, but it can also act as a roadblock for the writing itself.

If you think about the potential results of the finished product ahead of the work of building the story, you won’t be satisfied by the actual results. Ego focuses on results. A mind that sets ego aside to do the work of digging in to the story can focus more intensely on that story.

What you write isn’t about you or what it can do for you. It’s about the lives of the characters. You serve them first, and if you do that job completely and competently, they’ll serve you well.

So how do you take yourself out of the equation?

Focus On What You Control

You don’t control how anyone reacts to what you write. If you feel yourself thinking about how others will read the pages, take a moment and consider how these thoughts are you writing fiction, but not the kind of fiction you can put on the page. Acknowledge and accept that this happens, then ask yourself where you should direct your thoughts and energy.

You control what words you form. You control your thoughts about your characters. You control the research you do and the thought you give to your characters and their lives. You control when you write and for how long.

Whatever happens after you click Send, Print, or Submit is out of your hands.

Don’t Connect The Dots

Does your story connect to others that you’ve written? Is this something that may help establish your brand as a writer? That’s great! Don’t think about it.

You have one story that you’re focused on at the moment you’re writing it. Your computer keyboard only types in one application at a time. If you’re using a pen, you can only write on one piece of paper at a time. Whatever you’re working on in that moment should be the place where you direct your attention, and the desire to connect this to your other work leads to thoughts that take you out of the story and away from the characters. It makes what you’re writing all about you instead of all about them.

Accept Your Desires

You want what you’re writing to be read by other people. You want them to like it. You want them to shower you with praise and maybe some money. You want awards and adulation.

That’s fine. Very few people cheerfully go to work on what they’re writing with the thought, “I can’t wait to put this in a drawer and never show it to anybody!” And yet, chances are there will be plenty of things you write that go on a shelf or in a drawer and don’t get many eyes on them. That’s fine, too.

It’s OK that you want great things to come of your work, but that can’t be what you’re thinking about when it’s time to do the work. If you need to take a moment, set a timer. Take two or three minutes to think about all the wonderful things that are sure to come your way once you finish this, and all the joy you’re going to feel.

Then stop.

Now think about the work. Think about the characters. Think about that page in front of you and the words that come next. Fill your mind with those things.

Tell Yourself Today Will Not Be The Day

Today will not be the day you write the line of dialogue that gets you an Academy Award. It will not be the day that you type Fade Out on the script that bowls over the Nicholl judges. Today will not be a day when you write a single brilliant, amazing thing. Say it out loud if you think it will do a better job of convincing yourself.

But none of those thoughts are going to stop you from writing.

Release yourself from the pressure held in by your ego. You don’t need to live up to its expectations today. Today you can just work. Today you don’t need to have it looking over your shoulder, judging your every keystroke. Today, you don’t need to listen. Nobody is expecting anything of you in this moment, which means that anything you do is a step in the right direction.

Is any of this easy? Of course not. It’s a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute battle.

But it can be fought and won.