- Fantastical Tales
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Archive
Watering the roots
My earliest memory of making up stories is kind of fade. I vaguely remember strolling around my grandmother's yard and telling fantastic stories of magic, unicorns and dolls coming, to life to no one in particular. I would pull the weeds off the flower pots and smell the miniature roses while talking non-stop. Once my grandmother peeked from the living room and smiled, telling me to "keep talking to the angels". Come to think of it, my strongest memory is actually of me terrified that the angels were listening to my Barbie stories and thinking I might be talking to them.Then there was the lying phase. I would come up with tiny white lies, and also big ones that were too on the nose, as kids do. But the white lies kind of stuck, and for many years I had to make a conscious effort not to include tiny little lies into otherwise mundane tellings of facts. I convinced myself it was just a way of trying to make everyday conversation more interesting.There was also the time when I wrote a book. At least it felt like a book, as I filled an entire notebook and even glued more pages to it, but might have been more of a short novel. It had a lot of The Wizard of Oz in it, but non-intentional. There was a group of kids, and they would fall into a top hat only to find themselves in a desert, looking for a castle where an enigmatic magician would give them magic powers. I wrote it for a writing contest but never sent it; it was supposed to fit in a notebook.It seems so obvious now, looking back, that storytelling was my thing. You know, the thing you love doing. I oddly still talk to myself all the time when I am alone, most of it making up stories, except not about unicorns anymore. But I don't write them nearly half as much. And often this realization comes with a sting of self-doubt and questioning. This grey area where your thing and your work cross is so, so dangerous. We see it happen so often when working in games, people mistaking their passions for their job.And I don't know, maybe I am too. For the longest time all I could see in these episodes of my early storytelling life was an anxious girl learning to cope with her anxieties. Memories are a funny thing. Not like binders of pages covered in typed-down evidence of our lives, but more like orbs filled with holographic liquid. Take a look under the right light and you'll see something new there. New colors.Or a group of lost kids learning what magic really means. Dammit, that was a good one. Should have sent it.-Maíra
Avalanche
Write like an avalanche somehow missing the skier.I don't remember where I first read this quote, and I am almost sure it had been in the context of a joke, yet for some reason I jotted it down a bright pink post-it note and hang it on a wall right beside my desk. Sometimes I glance at it for a second and laugh.I have no idea what it means.
Glue
I woke up this morning with a scene from Before Sunset in my head.Which is funny, because this weekend I rewatched Before Sunrise, the film that comes (I apologize) before this one in Linklater's trilogy. But I have not hit play on Before Sunset in almost a year. So how? Why?Well, a good answer could be because this is my favorite movie in the trilogy, duh but that would not do for a newsletter issue. So instead I have been asking myself what makes some stories linger.Did you cry in Toy Story 3? It's alright, almost everyone did. But why? I am not sure the same elements that make a story important to us, something that we will remember, are the ones that trigger emotional reactions like crying or laughing out loud (or just getting very angry) but they do have some connection. Strong emotions are retained as memories in our brains for reasons I am several PhDs away of even explaining. I remember the stories that triggered big emotions in me, but they do not show up as frequent as the stories that I know taught me something.Of course I cried and cry every time I watch Before Sunset, I mean, geez. Can you not cry in that movie? And of course remembering Andy's toys accepting their fate and embracing each other to face doom made me sob, but that memory does not wake me up in a Monday morning and leave me thinking for the rest of the day.And there is this incredible thing about the human body and how it keeps taking care of itself. Hunger triggers headache, stress triggers lack of sleep, and so it goes. What if we keep conjuring these stories - even the ones you lived yourself, like stories you have been through in your childhood - as a mechanism to answer questions our language center is yet to factor into words?What if those stories are healing wounds you don't even know you are bleeding through?Mondays, am I right?-Maíra
Halted halfway
We all have a notebook.You know, that notebook. Perhaps not a notebook per se, but somewhat equivalent - full of lost thoughts, shower ideas and tiny sparks. A place for things that are not really born yet, but also not entirely dormant. Maybe it's sitting in a dusty corner in your head, maybe in your phone's notes, maybe even scattered around a number of post-its you don't remember where you stored. Half-baked unborn creations.Creativity is not a mysterious god-given talent. It takes work, practice, tons (and I mean TONS) of references and exhaustive resilience. The best way to stay creative is arguably to never reject your own ideas, no matter how critical you might be of them. It takes a shitload of bad ideas to find a good one. Fill pages and pages of your notebook with bad and good and lukewarm creations. It exercises the right muscles, and hurts just like getting back to the gym.But there is a stage, a stage beyond the notebook, that I dread the most: the desertion.Say you pick something on your notebook. Yes, that one; you like it. It tips more to good than lukewarm and you feel excited - that's the one. With some elbow grease you kickstart it into life. It's not a note in a page anymore, it is something, a real thing. And some time after, it stops being something. Motivation, or time, or - how ironic - creativity dies down. There is no room to work on this something, there is no more grease to put on this elbow. Desertion: when a project dies, or goes into hibernation.We all have those, too - some of us more than others, myself included. Funny enough for this type of creative individual, the constant process of adding things to our notebooks, picking one and unraveling it, realizing we don't have the energy to bring it to life and starting all over again is not all bad. To be honest, it is one of my creative pet peeves. I love hating this process, I love going through it so I can complain about it. Falling in love for an idea and obsessing over it for some time, until I don't anymore. And then jumping to another one with equal passion and recklessness. It works for me in particular as an experiment of sorts, an endless parade of new sparks that don't ever sit still. A way to exercise the muscles and hurt after getting back to the gym.No rights or wrongs. No conclusions here. Maybe today's issue, too, was doomed to desertion.-Maíra
In the absence of hope
I believe in the power of hidden beauty, the fascination buried beneath pleasing aesthetics, the delicacy in a shared moment of awe. Beauty, not the physical type, but the one that touches our souls, that moves us. I believe there is beauty in sadness, in terror, in grief and in the mundane. I believe we can always find something beautiful even in dire times.It is really hard to see beauty in a world that seems to crumble, where nothing is the same as we have ever known. We feel like we are spiraling downwards, endlessly drawn to doom, whatever doom turns out to be. For now doom has many faces, many possibilities, and we can see all of them, all at once, all around us.I have, for a brief moment, lost hope in beauty.
The Guardians
Back in film school I was brainwashed into believing that there were some types of media, and some types of narratives, that were inherently worse than others. Blockbuster movies, or whatever we now classify super hero movies as (since this particular niche got very popular in the past decade), were bad. Independent or director movies, on the other hand, were art. Reality shows were trash; TV dramas were gold. And so it goes.For a few cringe-worth semesters - you know, the type of memory that makes you physically flinch whenever you recall it - I turned into the dreadful film student type. Watching Goddard, reading Eisenstein, stating "romantic comedies are the death of cinematography". I felt like someone who learned the truth, and everyone else was blinded by a curtain of lies.What snapped me out of it was studying - and producing - live TV. The level of craft involved in bringing a live TV show together is such that I immediately regret ever thinking that my poorly executed short movies were in any way superior to, say, a variety show. And ever since I've been trying to keep my mind open and diversify the stories I consume.This is what I now view as gatekeeping, ways to limit and ultimately exclude people from certain circles; only these narrative styles are worthy, only those stories are good. A YA (young adult) writer? You shall not pass. You make casual games? You don't even tell stories. Guardians of whatever that is. Good storytelling? The honor of the craft?Don't get me wrong, there is so much low quality entertainment out there. Just like in every other field that the human audacity led us into, you will always be able to find the trash and the gold mixed together somewhere in there. But learning how to filter them is an acquired ability. Above all else, there is always something to be learned from bad storytelling. What went wrong? How would you fix it, if you could?What made the last Star Wars movie trash? Was it really trash? Was it objectively wrong or that is a personal opinion? Wasn't it entertaining, in the end? I ask all that while sipping my wine and hitting play on yet another trashy Netflix series. I'm studying, I say to myself. It's for science. Even if only to pledge never to make these same mistakes.-Maíra
Writing what we can
Almost since this whole whatsthis scenario started, I have been itching to write something. It felt like forgetting a word but you can feel it is right there, on the tip of your tongue. I had no idea what I wanted to write about, and despite trying different paths, nothing came up.Writing must come with purpose, at least that is what I have always thought. Sometimes what stops us is self-conciousness; I often don't want to write something I think it's not good enough, or that fails to tell a story. But really, what is a story, so you know you failed? Beginning, middle, end? Setup, conflict, resolution? Isn't any conversation we have a story on its own?Thinking of everyday stories, things that simply happen to us or to the world around us, reminds me of kishōtenketsu. It is the classic Eastern narrative model in which stories are understood as a sequence of introduction, development, twist and resolution. Kishōtenketsu is also about harmony, so the ten is a point where you introduce a foreign element, an imbalance to the ordinary world established in ki and shō. Reaching harmony in ketsu is not about surpassing an obstacle or beating an opposing force, but assimilating the new element into your reality. One could argue it leads to a lack of conflict in a story, but that is not the point; the point is that conflict is not the center of it.While coming back to this overestimation of conflict, I think of not being able to write despite how much I want to write, of the fear of not finding a so-called good story to tell. And how ego feels more relevant now that our internet personas became our whole personas, in a year where most if not all of our relevant social connections were made online. Is it that important? Should every story be incredible, extraordinary, tied in a pretty bow of answers and resolutions?Often when I get into this "must write something good" mode, I turn to the one exercise that helps me unlock, which is free writing. Ten minutes, pen and paper, just write whatever is on my mind. Took me a while to understand it is in fact an exercise in letting go of your ego. Materializing thoughts into words is a story in itself, the words accommodate to each other and create a narrative of their own.There is value in writing shitty blocks of text that go from nowhere to nowhere else; it is the exercise of the craft, heart surgeons mastering meditation, ice skaters learning how to twerk. The core of what makes it time worth spending is how it will add up to your knowledge, your experiences. Make no mistake, I am writing this to convince myself too.Any shitty is better than no shitty. Right?-Maíra
