Maybe Senpai Will Notice You This Year

(Written instead of "Helping Your Child Cope with Back-to-School Anxiety")

School is starting again! Do you have your cute outfit and hair accessories picked out? Have you called your friends to find out if you have the same lunch? Do you have 8 sharpened #2 pencils and the requisite number of binders? Good job! That's 10% of the battle, and 10% of all your anxieties set to rest.

But what if senpai doesn't notice you this year?!

He's so dreamy. With his hair and his eyes. You really want to touch his hair. I bet it's softer than it looks. And you could get lost in his eyes. There are untold depths there of all the things you don't know about him. And his smile—that secret one, just for you, that he gave you in the hallway that one time. He's so nice and smart and funny. I bet he'd be even more nice and smart and funny once you get around to having a conversation with him about his favorite bands and snack food and tragic back story. It's a very tragic back story. You can soothe his pain with your love. And then get married.

If only he would notice you. But alas. He probably doesn't know your name. Or that you're meant to be together.

It's tragic and stressful suffering through your unrequited love. But good news! Here are some tips for winning him over.

1. Make sure your outfit is super cute. Cute first-day-of-school outfits have a direct correlation with popularity.
2. Trip and fall on him. Surefire way to get his attention. Maybe he'll help you pick up your scattered books. Maybe he'll tell you that your skinned knee looks painful and his eyebrows will furrow with concern. Your heart might explode. Bring a paper bag to breathe into as soon as he picks you up off the floor and leaves with his friends.
3. Talk to him. Haha. No. Just kidding.
4. Check out his friend. He's such a jerk. So rude. You can't stand him and yet you know all about him and you can bicker with him for hours. Spoiler for next spring: he's the love of your life. Move on sooner rather than later.

Columbus Discovers Virginia

The single biggest thing that irritates me while reading is when I can't tell if the author is ignorant or if the character is ignorant.

For example, I once read a story with beautiful descriptions of this old, decrepit mansion named after the mansion in Citizen Kane.  Awesome.  Awesome until they named the mansion "The Citizen."  And I blew a gasket.  Now, do none of the characters in this book realize that the mansion in Citizen Kane is called Xanadu, thus showing their ignorance as they try to look more cultured than they are?  Or has the author never actually seen this movie?  I feel like the former is more interesting and telling of the characters, but I also feel like there would be further evidence of this in the story.  Like an informed character would call them on it.

This also happens a lot in young adult post-apocalyptic fiction.  Accurate history has been lost, so the characters state facts that are just not true.  I can understand how this would be a difficult line to walk.  If none of the characters in the universe the author has created knows the truth, then mentioning that this isn't how it happened could break several point of view rules.  But on the other hand, I side eye sections where the facts they're repeating already exist in the realm of "common misconceptions of today."  Then I have to wonder if I'm reading too much into it to assume that the characters are just misinformed, when it's just that the author didn't listen in high school history.

I think this partially comes from the modernist lens through which I see the world.  My first question when I get stumped with something is to ask "what did the author mean with this?"  Then if I can't guess, I get frustrated.

As a corollary to this, if I'm stopping to ask myself this, it means I've been thrown out of the story, and I don't like that.

I think it also comes from the long period of time I spent editing the speculative fiction of a group of teen girls.  This creeping horror builds in my chest and climbs up my throat every time I have to write the question, "Do you realize that what you just wrote is sexual assault?"  While in my head I'm screaming, DO YOU KNOW THAT THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE?!  THERE IS NO EVIDENCE HERE THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS NOT OKAY.  Okay, so your characters don't get this, but PLEASE TELL ME YOU ARE NOT BUYING THAT THIS IS ROMANTIC.

And then this leads into the tangled mess of whether or not I think the author has the moral obligation to present a message I agree with.  And the short answer is "sorta."  Romanticizing terrible things makes me queasy, but then I understand that what I think is terrible is completely different from what other people think is terrible.  For instance, I don't care about swearing and don't care if the author glamorizes their profane characters.  But missing an opportunity to use the word Xanadu?  That's unacceptable. 

Fourier Series in Everyday Life.

I'm going to talk about math, and then I'm going to get philosophical, so stick with me.

There is this thing called a Fourier Series.  The Fourier Series is the subject of my favorite joke of all time, and no one ever gets it and that is one of life's cruelties. 

Basically, let's say you have a weird function and you want to find the equation for it. 

Like this step function I made in MS Paint.

Sometimes, it's just too hard to get the exact equation because the function you want was drawn in a default image editor, so you decide to get as close as you can and just use that. 

Oh yeah!  Looking good!

So I draw a sine wave (the blue line), which gets the up and down part but leaves something to be desired.  This first guess is called the first order term, or the first thing you do.  But we can do more.  We can take another sine wave, add it to this one, and together they add and subtract from each other to bring us closer to what we want.

A graph I didn't draw in MS Paint

So here, the black shows the first order term.  The blue shows the first order term added to another sine wave, and the red shows an even higher order term to get pretty close to that blocky function we wanted.  Ta dah!  Close enough!

Yesterday, I realized that I approach projects as if they were Fourier Series.  The first draft or the first try is like the first order term.  It's general and not even really close to what you want, but it's a start.  Then you go over it and make it a touch better, then a touch better than that.  The corners of your blocky function stat to come in.  You iron out individual pieces.  Only later can you start working out details until you get close enough to what you want.

Word Choice to Reflect Character Mood

In the story on which I'm currently working, the main character can possess inanimate objects and make them move around.  He takes it as a point of professional pride that these movements are as lifelike as possible.  His favorite is a paper-craft dog that runs around and acts like a real dog.  The point is that he devotes a large amount of time and effort to making sure people don't know that he's the one moving the dog around, to making it look like he's not a puppeteer, but rather making people believe that the dog is alive and acting of its own volition.

This presents an interesting writing decision.

The emphasis could be on the dog's actions, presented as if it is its own character as most people would see the dog.  "She wagged her tail, the whole back half of her body swinging with her enthusiasm."

Or the emphasis could be on how he is controlling the dog, which makes sense since the story is from his perspective.  "He caused her tail to wag enthusiastically, swinging the whole back half of her body."

So which way to go?  I think it really depends on the situation, and is a line by line decision rather than an umbrella decision that affects each and every instance.

• How much is the main character thinking about his actions?  Is he trying something difficult where he really has to focus on his actions?
• How much has he deluded himself that the dog is a separate entity?
• Is there some fatigue in the paragraph from being specific about that he's controlling the dog.  "Yeah, yeah.  We get it.  He's controlling the dog."  Because it (or at least the example I just used) strikes me as clunky writing and a whole passage written like that is going to slow the story down, but that might be a good device at certain points.  
• How much is he working on deluding others?  Or how plot essential is it at the moment that he's pretending that the dog's a dog?  Reminding the reader that he's controlling the dog would break the illusion.

So basically, it's going to be a continuum, and the choice will reflect the main character's state of mind in the moment.

This is kind of like some previous things I've written where characters use an alias.  Which name I call them depends on who they're with, how they're acting, and if they're identifying more with one personality or another.

I'm sure there are other examples of this.  Any suggestions?

BYOT XIII

(Edit 9/1/14: the video is up!  Watch it!)

Despite my fears and awkward posts about how I didn't know what I was doing, my script at Bring Your Own Theater turned out well.  The actors liked the characters, and the director said I made it the easiest day of his life and then drunkenly kissed everyone.  I've heard it said that the best compliment you can give an artist is not to tell them that you love their work, but to tell someone else that you love their work.  At BYOT, someone came up to me and said, "I heard your script is great," meaning that someone who had read it had told them this.  That's all kinds of awesome, even if people were being especially nice to me after I acted so concerned and new.

But more importantly than my script getting good reception, the play was amazing.  The actors (who were all unbelievable) completely owned it.  As my director told them later in a fit of excited passion, "You were the only three people in that room."  They changed some lines by adding swear words which made it feel more natural and emotional, and they added a few jokes, all of which I approve of 100%.  It was a collaborative effort--one that I'm honored I was a part of and was not at all something worth worrying about.  I gave them a plot and characters and a spirit, and then ran with it, expanded upon it, made it breathe.

So it was awesome and I liked it, and I'm sharing the video of the performance and my script below the cut.  Enjoy!