#and itty bitty will and Tenzing

[argetcross]

Temeraire, Tharkay, and Laurence in the Alps

[seenashwrite]

Dearest Nash, I've touched on this before in (I believe) in a discussion re: why some mainstream fics get oodles of notes while more original ones do not, *but* I wanted to get a bit more specific here. There are certain writers here whose writing has a definite vibe to it (if you will) that separates their work from others, and your name is one of the first that comes to mind. Bear with me, because trying to detail what makes your writing stand out is difficult while trying to articulate a Q

^ this is a gif with parts 2 - 4, just FYI

Hmmm… this is a bit of a brain buster. But I can answer it, and I think succinctly, maybe with a touch of that Spidey sense you mention:

Thank you for your inquiry, hope that helps! 

I kid. But this is a brain-turner. And a characteristic which, like you say, ain’t limited to me. I’d honestly throw comedians under this umbrella, too, not because I’m necessarily gunning for a laugh every time, but because it’s pretty much their job to take a “basic” (a tenet or fact of life or present reality or whatever) and present the observation with a twist. I think of storyteller comedians specifically, your Patton Oswalt-s, Maria Bamford-s, Kathy Griffin-s, and John Mulaney-s.

So if I can sum up, assuming I’m tracking with you, what you’re more or less driving at with the “how” is this –> Is there anything beyond simply personality, or an auto-pilot thought cascade (for lack of better terminology) that contributes? Are there things someone could do/be proactive about, to perhaps cause this same sort of reaction to happen in their brain?

I think there just might be.

Folks reading this, let me ask you a question, and you cannot look it up:

What was the name of the Sherpa guide who led Sir Edmund Hillary up Mount Everest?

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His name was Tenzing Norgay.

Nash, what in the name of the frozen corpse of George Mallory does this have to do with Lion’s question?

I shall tell you.

My father told me that fact when I was quite young, so young I legit couldn’t even ballpark my age for you. The context was that having little facts tucked away in your brain may come in handy. Not in a Jeopardy kind of way, more in a conversational way. I’ve no idea why the man thought the Sherpa guide who led Hillary up Mt. Everest would ever come up during a conversation with enough regularity to justify my knowing that fact (aside from him randomly quizzing me throughout my life) but hey, I guess it just did.

But speaking of Lil’ Nash, the situation for her was that she was the eldest of all the Nash litter by miles… like seven or eight years, I’m not bothering to check. So I had a lot of alone time, and my grandmother was my chief babysitter, so prior to kindergarten and then til I was in about second grade (so: all day long during the week, then every weekday after she picked me up from school), I was pretty much always at her house. Yeah, there were toys, but not a lot to do. And I’d read. I’d been reading on my own for a decent while, not because I was some prodigy but because my dad read to me *constantly* when Lil’ Nash was Itty-Bitty Nash, and it “took”. My mom also, every time she went to the grocery store always - and I mean always - brought back a book for me. It might’ve been an Archie comic—-

Mandatory #fuck the CW’s Riverdale tag

—-or a Babysitter’s Club, or Sweet Valley High, Judy Blume, Madeleine L’Engle, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, you get my point. Some small paperback. It would piss Dad off because he’s a cheap bastard and two buck books once or twice a month were really gonna cut into the savings [eyeroll] but also, in a way, because I’d kill it in a half day/a day. Wouldn’t put it down. After awhile, I started writing my own silly little kid stories, then - and this is where the creative writing love came about -  I started writing soap operas for my Barbies. (When I was older - like, 5th grade? 6th grade, maybe? - none of my peers were still playing with Barbies, and I got made fun of when, at a sleepover, they saw my stash. And I was like - No, no, no. Those aren’t for playing. That’s my cast.)

Time went on, and when I was bored at post-church lunch/dinners, I would also read the old encyclopedias at my grandmother’s, the ones from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s that she had for my mom and my aunt. As I got even older and became fascinated with rooting through the boxes in gran’s basement, looking at all the cool old clothes, I stumbled upon my aunt’s collection of Whoa-Hooooo Shit There’s No Way My Grandparents Knew You Read These books. Those kinda Harlequin-esque ones, except my aunt’s tastes run close to mine, none were the same shtick with different covers, shmultzy-sappy romance, there was always some sort of intrigue along with the sexy times, and she also had, like, every legit V. C. Andrews (meaning: not the ones from the ghostwriter, this was way before her death) book.

What is my point? I read a LOT. Now-a-days, other than fanfic (which… straight up: I don’t read a lot of that, either. I peace out on probs 80% of it before the third-to-fifth paragraph. It’s gotta sell me fast, yo) I haven’t read fiction in probably, oh…. 12 years? I think the last ones were the first couple Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Wait, no! I lie! I read the 50 Shades books when I was traveling 2x/wk for a job about 4 years ago, and I needed the laughs. It worked. Oh my days, that woman can’t write. The screenplay might’ve been worse, it goes her, then Buckleming, then everyone else. It’s bad. In any event, past decade or so, it’s more historical stuff and true crime and science stuff and all that old fart jazz.

Okay, so that’s #1: Read. And not just anything, be well-read, and that doesn’t mean developing some level of expertise, by “well” I’m saying to cover the spread. You’re building your tool kit, is all. You won’t use most of it, but it’s nice to have options. You also don’t always have to get this stuff from reading now-a-days, because podcasts. Cover the spread there, too. Lemme look at my bookmarks…. 

[Spongebob narrator voice: A few moments later]

I’m back. Science - Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe; General current stuff without being news - CGP Grey’s Hello Internet; current events with shittons of pop culture, past and present - Greg Proops’ Smartest Man in the World; fun history stuff - The Dollop; entertainment stuff - How Did This Get Made.

#2: Keep a notebook with you and jot down turns-of-phrase that spark something in your brain - things you read on websites, on twitter, in articles, things you hear people say (real life, TV, movies, podcasts), and write it. Don’t snap a pic with your phone or make a note in your phone. There are studies behind this, I’m not hunting them down, you’ll just have to trust me, but there are, and it goes to being reflexive, a brain “muscle memory” thing, if you will. You’re not doing it to plagiarize, you’re doing it to dissect it, kind’ve like you did with the example you gave on me —> went from punch action to punch spiked with booze to a punch with a spiked gauntlet.

Which leads to #3: Mental dictionary. I have a large vocab repository, and it stems from the tons of reading - I stop and look up stuff if I either don’t know it, or it’s used in such a way that I think they’ve got it wrong and want to double-check that maybe there’s another usage I don’t know - and also stems from a drive to combat the (still fairly thick) deep South drawl I can’t kick, and not for lack of trying. But see, I couldn’t have whipped out that progression if I weren’t aware that one definition of “spike” is “to add alcohol to”, or of the common shtick in stories of spiked punch like at high school proms typically, or knew about the existence of spiked gauntlets / old school armor. 

And I guarantee you that a good chunk of people didn’t really “get it”, and just thought “Nash Be Nashin’, that nutty gal”. So they “get it” on that level, but don’t Get. It., if you see what I’m saying. And that’s fine. Maybe it got something cranking in the back of their mind and it’ll hit ‘em in the middle of the night, or they’ll be watching Game of Thrones or something, see a gauntlet and be like “Oh goddamnit, I just got a throw-a-way one-liner from three years ago” and have a chuckle.

Related, re: looking stuff up and things that people “get”? I didn’t know fuck-all about Twilight, but it seemed of import to the folks around 5 years younger than me, the Nashlings wouldn’t shut up about it, so I got a good working knowledge of it. Same with Harry Potter, and through it I got to “know” J.K. Rowling, who I find to be an exceptional writer, so that was great, and I’ve watched the movies for the most part over the years at Christmastime, and I don’t give the first shit about what “house” I’m in, nor do I care about what Patronus I’d fart, but I have a working knowledge of what those are, and horcruxes and who Snape and Voldie are, you get my point. I can keep up. But to do it, I had to take the time to look it up. One thing I would not trade for gold is Michael Sheen chewing the goddamn scenery in that battle segment from the last Twilight movie. Have I watched the movie? No. But that scene is the shit. And that baby CGI is horrific on several subtle levels. And not-so-subtle. I’ve digressed.

Back to those notes: So if you’ve got these notes jotted, you might see something else and think “I feel like that could’ve been snappier…. why do I think that….” And you’ve got a resource at your disposal, that little notebook. Hell, jot that thing down - things you think could be done better. I have in many documents a highlight around chunks of scenes for my big dog story where it says in bold above or below “DO BETTER”. Meaning: there’s a better way to get from A to B, but I’m just not quite there yet. I’m pretty quick on the uptake and can crank out something snappy on the fly (like say, in CASPN chat or when banging out a short reply or thank you note) but there’s definitely times I gotta slap a DO BETTER on it and walk away til that snappy something-or-other light bulb goes off. 

Here’s a recent one where I backtracked, matter of fact - that noir spoof thing I wrote? Along with my co-writer, Moscato? There was a line that I couldn’t hit with a good zinger, so I just said moments were going by like a fat hamster on a wheel, which is cute, but not really grooving with the setting/the vibe. Less tipsy, when I was correcting some inelegant formatting and a misspelling [sigh], I went “Oh! Why didn’t this occur to me last night? Right. Wine.” So the line is now about moments dragging like a rolling donut with a copper on its tail. Get it? The cop’s a fat ass. The donut-cop stereotype.

…….Fine, it ain’t my best, but it fits better. Moving on.

And this leads nicely into #4, and a specific tip I can impart - assuming you’ve got a passable-to-high level of vocabulary in your tool belt, practice messing around with making nouns into verbs, and twisting random stuff into descriptors and using bizarre words/things in metaphors/analogies. Like, I say “adulting” quite a bit. Ali - @littlegreenplasticsoldier - I thiiiink was writing recently about Sam being drunk, and he’s a tall wobbly Jenga tower on his last Jenga. Going back to the noir, pulpy detective style, try messing with the whole “S/he was like a ___ that ____”. Add on to stuff that’s well known - He was like a dog with a bone, if the bone was a ____ and he was a ____ and we were in a ____. (I have *nothing* in mind to fill those blanks, by the way, feel free to twist it into sumpin’)

What else…. okay, here’s a #5: In drafts, let yourself wander, and see what kicks out. It can be fueled by silliness or anger, but I don’t reckon you’re gonna get the “snappy” you’re aiming for if you’re down in the dumps and going full-court-press angst. The best stuff, IMO, comes from the space in between goofy and pissed, and that is The Land Of Snark. You can always re-style it to bend more dry or wistful should you need to, certainly, depending on the situation.

Have a sample of a primo Nash Digression that was fueled by ire in a recap from Season 12 (episode 19). I had said - RE: the random inclusion of the character Joshua, which still pisses me off because they burned a character that held massive potential for future stuff as he’d been shown to be the only angel with direct access to Chuck, so, y’know, that could never come in handy, like ever again in the series, right? - the following.

Mandatory pre-emptive #fuck Dabb

[Spongebob narrator voice] A few moments later —> 

On god, I have no idea where that came from, and here’s where we go back to ol’ Spidey up there, because end of the day?

All that other stuff’s the foundation, sure, but there’s always gonna be the weird iggy, the thing that can’t be learned or taught, whatever the quirky synapse is that fires off in my/our brains. In my experience, it’s an ADD-ish sort of jam mixed with the Nostradamus effect. Meaning, (A) we’re at Level 10, rapid fire thought processing >50% of the time, and (B) throw out enough stuff for long enough, some of it’s going to stick. And I whiff it plenty. Multiple times in CASPN chat I’ve been like “Whoo, tough room” when something falls flat.

A specific example: @mrswhozeewhatsis - and I think you saw this, but anyone else seeing this may not have - gave probably the most fantastic analogy I’ve seen regarding the whole “getting it” thing, and while it was on the topic of meaty plots that get too far into the weeds (my specialty) and how it can lessen appeal to a broader audience, it still applies here. 

She said “Sometimes, when I’m reading something of yours, I feel like there’s a joke I’m missing. It’s like watching Spaceballs without having seen Star Wars.” I say that to say - nobody’s gonna land references that cover the spread 100% of the time. And, y’know, fine. I figure maybe it’ll prompt someone to do a quick google for - well, let’s use Spaceballs. Most folks will no doubt get the Star Wars part, but maybe not Spaceballs. Maybe they’ll check it out, find something they enjoy. Or learn a new word. Or get a brainstorm for a story. Who knows?

Last tip: Don’t actively mimic anyone’s style. Much fail. And I don’t only mean because if they’re on a social Venn diagram with you, would likely recognize themselves in your stuff——

Takes a moment to wave to the peeps still trying with me! #bless your hearts

—–but because it’s fucking hard. I did it broadly on the noir thing, that’s not a hard thing, to homage generalities, but the way I’m messing with doing this on that silly Princess Bride series? Purposefully styling it like Goldman? It’s good  challenging and all, and it is making it feel more in the groove with the book/movie, but I have to be in the right frame of mind or it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard, and when I have pushed it, then gone back, it’s sloggy, soggy garbage.

I say all that to say: it’s an amalgam of brain-wiring/personality, and world/life perspective(s), and knowledge acquired over time. The first just is; the second will evolve in myriad ways, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse; the last is the one where you/we have control, we can fill bucket after bucket of information, and the well won’t ever run dry.

Sorry this took so long. I kept adding and subtracting. This is the edited version, if you can believe it. Welcome to Nash Brain. 😉