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hellogirlslikegirlslikeboysdo · 4 months

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And the lights are not fluorescent, and there are no words on the page. - Voice/Rough Draft Essay

Author's Preface and Ch. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7

Description: My final portfolio for one of the creative writing courses I took based around exploring the creative nonfiction essay in its many literary forms, with any and all identifying names or signifiers censored out.

During my many travels, I have found sticking a man and his daughter in a hot car for approximately 116 miles, radio on low, murmuring music she likes and he doesn’t, homemade food in Tupperware in insulated beach bags in piles of slowly unfolding clothes in the back of the trunk, will, against or with their collective will, bring about conclusions. Asinine, podcast-y, “This action will have consequences“ conclusions. Some the father’s already decided and convinced the daughter of (and vice versa).

You’ll get them in a wide variety of (recurring) topics too! The entertainment industry, capitalism, education, and, if you, the reader, happened to be a stowaway on my last return to college, my mother’s own gradual and uncharitable concussion:

That she, at the ripe old age of 50-something, is done growing as a person.

It checked out when consulted her track record, like it was fact-checking for an intervention: Her slow-roasted resentment in my grandmother’s miserly recognition of her overwhelming lifelong achievements (and, subsequently, her brother for slurping up all the motherly attention grandma served up, like the part eched little thing he was), barely abated by her (1) confrontation of my grandmother’s behavior. The following mourning period, shared with me and my father for two months at best. Her go-to apology: “I guess I’m a bad person then!” said in the most patronizing voice she could muster (and believe me when I say she has plenty of experience).

My mother is a firecracker more than she is a woman, raw, rich personality stuffed inside what looks like Barbie-laminated plastic, engineered at initial creation to shoot off into the sky quicker than the strike of a match. To burn out, quietly, like the star that she is, following the promise of a thunderous boom. A great disappointment you only understand in adulthood.

Of course she saw life, her life, as just sorta…like that. Nothing to be done about it, you could figure she figured. Best to hang that soggy pit of sadness on the coat rack and hope to god it dries in time for work tomorrow.

I wasn’t grown up though, despite my age of 20 whole years. At least, not enough to understand how anyone else could think like that. Could find something tucked away in the recess of their life that just wasn’t quite right, and go “...Mmmm that should be good enough.” The best explanation, the one meant for someone so young and hopeful in their delusions, was found in the very first conclusion I managed to bulldoze my father into coming to that evening: Ever since man first inhaled the emancipating power of creativity and survived the exhale, there has been art born out of someone, somewhere, going “...Well, it looks like the picture in the book”, and calling it a night.

You may be surprised to hear this, considering this little article of mine is (arguably) fairly coherent and, at the very least, not actively killing your brain cells, but my favorite television show of all time is one of the laziest, thoughtless, and most exhaustive pieces of media 14-year-old me had ever seen in her measly little life. It was a 15-minute serialized animated cartoon named Breadwinners running on Nickelodeon's spinoff channel, Nicktoons, at the time, aired only two seasons, and if you value your time and self-respect, you will not watch it. All you need to know about the show is the words of its co-“creator” (the term, of course, used in the most ambiguous sense possible, within the confines of human minds) Gary Di Raffaele on his and Steve Boris shared writing process: “I think, when you watch a Breadwinners episode, it feels and it sounds like no other cartoon because it’s, it’s got that, that constant drive, that constant beat.“ (“Meet The Creators”), an unofficial elaboration on the previous statement, “The way we produce our show is pretty much unlike anything else that’s been produced.” (“Meet The Creators”).

What follows these sentiments are only a few more words on the animation process and the collaborative angle the show’s crew takes, but Gary’s tone (and the show itself) is so clear and obvious that the second part of that sentence, I feel, can barely be classified as an inference. “Unlike anything else that’s been produced”, because that’s what makes the show so unique, so fun and wacky and zany!

So good.

The filming of this interview (with the help of fevered, extensive consumption of both every decent video essay critiquing this show and every episode of the show I’ve gotten my hands on) has only confirmed my suspicions. Sometime after the greenlighting of their pilot and the subsequent order of a first season, Raffaele and Boris had come to the reasonable observation that one of the many redeeming qualities used to defend a show’s quality is its supposed uniqueness, its fresh ideas or concepts. Even its ability to introduce familiar archetypes and plotlines and tropes in a new and exciting way, or with a twist or subversion of sorts! They then, despite now having contact with at least a few of Nickelodeon's experienced and accomplished writers now within contact, stumbled down one of the many historic writing pitfalls of overeager amateurs and seasoned veterans who have lost their touch over time: The assumption that because their writing looks like some of the quality art they’ve seen before, it simply must be of just as high a quality.

This artistically stunting philosophy grows in many familiar places, the way mold grows on trash bins left on the curb on a hot summer Tuesday. You may find it in the 12-year-old who is just beginning to explore their artistic capabilities by tracing screenshots of anime characters they found online, or the burned-out cartoon writer, a fast-approaching deadline for the shipment of an episode’s storyboard hanging over their head, and a hastily downed Starbucks coffee hanging off the side of their desk. You may even find it trapped within the inner workings of your own creative work (though I do hope you never do). Either way, you will find the same outcome in every new example you find yourself confronted with:

The writer eventually mistakes their work’s resemblance to the type of art they aim to recreate, whether that be in the way said example tugs at the heartstrings or gets its viewer’s blood pumping, for proof that their work accomplishes these feats too, simply due to its traceable proximity to its inspiration.

The stand-up comic throws in jokes that don’t land because they have identifiable setups and punchlines, the romance novelist adds a sex scene even when it grinds the plot to an unnecessary halt because her favorite book has one too, and the writers behind Breadwinners use an inventive new production strategy to make the zaniest, off-the-wall scripts their network had ever seen, in hopes they would help the show stand out amongst all the other wacky competition in each week’s programming block and ensure each episode shocks and surprises 9-12 year olds everywhere. That Breadwinners would be innovative, eye-catching, and above all else, unique.

This inherent “uniqueness”, of course, was presumed to come neatly prepackaged with the intended goal of their solely comedy-focused cartoon: Making the viewer laugh. In any way possible. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Breadwinners, you know fully well that it did not.

“But [REDACTED],” You cry. “Haven’t you ever written something in the style of the things you like? Who are you to judge?” Normally, I would recount the “Appeal to Hypocrisy” fallacy in detail, but this article is already long enough (I would also question why you are talking to an online article as if it can hear you, but I digress). I will instead surrender my own early work, “Body Swichers” (I invite you to ignore the spelling, if you can), as tribute, and instead call your attention to this excerpt from a twelve-year-old me with a cliche plot line and far-too-early access to Microsoft Word: “Instead of the cheerful, spike-haired boy, he saw his sarcastic, witty friend, Gretchen in the mirror…Megee raced toured the closet and pulled out an antique, dusty, enormous book.” (Sacristan 1)

Notably bad grammar and sentence structure aside, this quote is a direct result of my ongoing journey as a writer. The first thing I had ever written, the first chapter of a romance/adventure story, was an attempt to recreate the magic I’d found in the many, many novels I had gotten lost in as a child. It was, predictably, not successful. Every line held the bland and awkward hallmarks of a child’s first draft, despite both my parents’ insistence on how it didn’t. Instead of falling back on the idea that it was good by virtue of it sharing an intended style with works I had deemed good, however, I opened up my laptop a few weeks later, pulled up Internet Explorer, and set out to find why that chapter didn’t intrigue me as much as the writing in my favorite series.

This process soon led to the discovery that the books I liked had big, descriptive words in them, words like “sarcastic” and “antique” and “enormous”. The incorporation of these words in my next work led to the question of why everything I wrote sounded so clunky and redundant all of a sudden, which led to learning about effective word choice, and then good sentence structure, and then impactful tone and atmosphere, and countless other improvements! Most importantly, however, is how it highlights the difference between my approach and Boris and Raffaele, despite still sitting at an amateurish level myself.

They took inspiration thinking it would ensure quality work, to somehow magically copy and paste its greatness into their own writing. I took inspiration to learn what made it so great in the first place.

So, there. That, I figure, is how someone could look at something in their life, whether it be art, a personal flaw, or even their entire self, and assume it resembles what it's supposed to look like well enough to “pass”, whatever in god’s name that’s supposed to mean. (One way, at least.) And I’m sure this theory could apply to other aspects of issues I’ve touched upon in this article. The dire need to push yourself as a writer and avoiding the comfort of creative complacency in your work, the way this type of thinking directly informs the prevailing disrespect children’s television writers holding in their audience, mistranslating “silly and childish” as “good enough for kids”, even how that reflects a wider disrespect for children in society as a whole!

I hope, however, the single grain of wisdom you and I both take away from this literary exploration is the same one I found detailed in Stephen King’s autobiography, On Writing, in his mother’s disappointment upon realizing that that the little hand-drawn comics he’d been showing her were direct tracings of someone else’s work. IN the novel, she dismisses the original works, citing them as “junk” and insisting that she “...’bet you [he] could do better. Write one of your own.’” (King 28)

Can you imagine, truly, if King (a young child who’d never written an actual story in his whole life and could have very easily done so!) had disregarded his mother’s advice under the guise that nothing could be better than something identical to one of his favorite things to read, that drawing something that looks like them was good enough on its own? If we were forced to live in a world where this advice didn’t lead him to publish so many of the literary classics we know and love today, like “It”, or “Carrie”, or “The Outsider”?…I can’t, since I haven’t actually read any of his books, but this world has been gracious enough to let me bear witness to Carrie (1976), the Carrie musical’s off-broadway cast album, and some of the loveliest It fanart I’ve ever seen, So I imagine that world, in the kindest of words, totally blows. It stands to reason, then, that we, as writers, have a creative duty to keep growing and improving both ourselves and our work, to make sure we never come to see it.

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