Write On: You're Doing It Wrong (a House Special)

Have you been enjoying my various tales of yesteryear? I hope so.

I know my dad has. Here’s a comment he left after one of my Adventures in Leaving the House: “I so love your writing. Please consider writing more in an observation of life and its turns and faux pas.”

Very sweet and supportive feedback to be sure. But given the struggles I’ve had lately with my books, it made me ask the question: Am I focusing on the wrong kind of writing? Should I ditch pretenses of “upmarket noir” and swing back to observational essays? After all, my reviews of bad movies were just a stylized and specific type of observational humor.

And it’s not like I don’t make those kind of observations anymore – I just haven’t been writing about them. Here’s one that hit me early one morning while I was sleepwalking through getting my daughters ready for school:

Rupert Holmes’ 1979 hit “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” 

is a catchy tune about fundamentally terrible people

(A Father’s Day Special)

Let’s take this thing apart and hope I don’t permanently ruin this song for my dad.

The song opens with that famous guitar and keyboard riff (chord? And is it both instruments? I’m crap with music) before Mr. Holmes singsplains some exposition:

I was tired of my lady, we’d been together too long
Like a worn-out recording, of a favorite song

Okay, so the guy is in a relationship that’s in a bit of a rut. It happens.

So while she lay there sleeping, I read the paper in bed
And in the personal column, there was this letter I read

Oh, so instead of trying to shake things up or – heaven forbid – talk to his girlfriend, this guy is combing the personals for some side action. Classy.

“If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the raid
If you’re not into yoga, if you have a half a brain
If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape
I’m the love that you’ve looked for, write to me and escape.”

Gross.

I have so many issues…

1. I’m sorry, but Pina Coladas taste like shit. It's essentially a splash of rum mixed with a collection of the worst fruit items imaginable -- I'm surprised it doesn't also contain that crummy green melon restaurants use as fruit salad filler. A Pina Colada is alcohol for grown-ups who want everything to taste like it came out of a juice box. Also, the fact that you have to bury the booze in that much fruit tells you everything you need to know about what I think about the taste of rum.
2. At the risk of sounding like your mother, weather reports are now accurate enough that there’s no possible reason to get caught in the rain these days. Grab a damn umbrella.
3. I get that yoga had a bad rap back when this song was written. But coming from the generation that gave us hippies? Shut up.
4. “If you have half a brain?” Based on this list so far, I don’t know if the writer of this personal ad is the best judge.
5. Maybe my age is starting to show, but I don’t want to make love at midnight – I’m asleep by then. And “in the dunes of the cape”? Clearly the writer of this personal ad has never done any such thing, because they’d know you’d get sand everywhere. No thanks.

Let’s move on.

I didn’t think about my lady
I know that sounds kind of mean

Yes. Yes it does.

But me and my old lady, had fallen into the same old dull routine
So I wrote to the paper, took out a personal ad
And though I'm nobody's poet, I thought it wasn't half bad

Also gross.

I’ll be the judge of that.

“Yes, I like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain
I’m not much into health food, I am into champagne”

Gross tastes in beverages (oh stop, you may like the ceremony of celebrating with champagne but don’t pretend you like the actual taste of champagne, nobody likes that "I need to shave my tongue now" feeling only champagne provides) and an unwillingness to take care of himself... Darwinism at its best!

“I've got to meet you by tomorrow noon, and cut through all this red tape
At a bar called O'Malley's, where we'll plan our escape”

Yep, one personal ad and this guy is full steam ahead on the Infidelity Express. Also, I have to wonder if this escape they’re planning is literal. Is he going to literally run off with this random woman to drink crappy cocktails and have sex in sand pits? Because every aspect of that sounds terrible.

So I waited with high hopes, then she walked in the place
I knew her smile in an instant, I knew the curve of her face
It was my own lovely lady…

Busted!

… and she said, "Oh, it's you"
And we laughed for a moment, and I said, "I never knew"

"That you liked Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain
And the feel of the ocean, and the taste of champagne
If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape
You're the love that I've looked for, come with me, and escape"

What? What? So to review: This couple is bored in their long-term relationship, they individually decide to step out on each other, only to discover they both share the same garbage tastes and never knew it? Ugh… At least they deserve each other.

 *   *   *

Next time at the House of Nolahn: Actual updates on my writing!

House Special: When You Wish Upon Some Cards

In an attempt to shake myself out of my writing funk, I'm temporarily turning my focus to getting small stories from my life out of my head and on the page. Will it work? Dunno, but it sounds like as good a way to prime the pump as any...

Like most boys growing up in the ‘80s, I was a big baseball fan. Back then, Major League Baseball was unquestionably the most popular sport in the land – it was still very much “America’s Pastime” – and nearly every kid between the ages of 5 and 15 played at least a season or two of Little League. I was no different, although saying I “played” was probably an overstatement: I spent most games either riding the bench or tucked away in right field where I could do the least amount of damage. My main contribution was at the plate, where I was smart enough to realize that most of the kids my age sucked at pitching and that if I only swung at pitches that were right down the middle, I’d probably get walked to first base.

My lack of skill or talent or athletic ability didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for the game, nor did the fact that I was a Red Sox fan. I come from a long line of Red Sox fans, back during a time when the Curse of the Bambino seemed to be very real. Generations had come and gone waiting in vain for the Sox to win a World Series, and the idea that this season would be their season was both laughable and too tantalizing to ignore. I’d spend many a hazy summer day playing baseball with the other guys in the neighborhood, exchanging Red Sox-Yankee trash talk, and debating whether Jim Rice or Dave Winfield was the better player.

(Answer: Rice was the better hitter, Winfield was a more well-rounded player.)

So it wasn’t surprising that around the age of nine, I started collecting baseball cards. I don’t remember how I started – hell, I might’ve just picked up a pack with some hard-earned pocket change to get the cheap piece of gum that was included – but soon I had enough Topps cards to move them from a shoebox to a proper binder. I kept adding cards, mostly from the 1983 series of Topps, but occasionally from other seasons, other lines or more random sources, like the Reggie Jackson card I got out of a box of Hostess Devil Dogs. I even got an occasional high-profile card for Christmas, like the one year I found a mint 1969 Tom Sever card in my stocking.

The jewel of my collection – not that I would know it until years later – was a rookie Ryne Sandberg card I’d obtained quite randomly from one of those Topps packets. Sandberg would go on to play 16 seasons (most of them with the Chicago Cubs) at second base and get inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2005. Thanks to the Internet, baseball cards don’t have the value that they used to, but that care alone is still worth about $70.

Sadly, I probably had a couple of these at the time.

I loved those cards, so much that – and I’m sure this will sound like heresy to a collector – I would play with them. I’d pull the cards of their sleeves and put together American League and National League all-star teams. Then I’d lay out the home team into their positions on the diamond and have batters come to the plate, imagining how my Rod Carew card would do against my Fernando Valenzuela card (Rod Carew would get a hit, of course – it’s Rod Carew). 

No need to fake this cover.

As much as I loved those cards, like many things in childhood, I eventually out-grew them. I stopped playing with toys, football became more interesting than baseball, and my binder of cards stayed on a bookshelf, collecting dust. After college, as I moved to Japan and then Boston, I would think about the collection from time to time. I’d left the cards at my parents’ house and because they’d rearranged and remodeled a few times over the years, I wasn’t entirely sure of where the card were or even if they’d been spared the trash heap. 

“I wish I could look through those cards again,” I’d say whenever the subject came up. “Even if I could only see them one more time, that’d be enough.” And then, strangely, that wish came true.

I was living in Boston at this point and received a call from my folks: They were doing some major remodeling to the entire house and wanted me to come down for a weekend to take care of the remaining things I still had there. I came down soon after, where I was presented with a large cardboard box of long-forgotten stuff: Dungeons & Dragons books, VHS tapes of random TV shows, a couple random action figures and, near the bottom of the pile, my collection of baseball cards. 

I was thrilled. Since it was a lazy, rainy day, I was able to spend the entire afternoon flopped out on the couch, slowly going through my collection. I poured over every page, familiar faces of sports heroes past looking back at me, occasionally pulling out a card to revisit stats and trivia printed on the back. Each new page was like a reunion.

When I was done, I carefully closed the binder and put it in the pile of items to take back to Boston with me. At least, I thought I did.

Turns out that wish to see the collection one more time was taken very literally because when I returned to Boston and unpacked, it was gone. I went through all the bags multiple times, went through the car twice as many times, and retraced my steps between the car and the apartment. Nothing. I called my folks to see if the binder had been left behind. Still nothing. I shrugged. What else could I do? I figured the cards would likely turn up somewhere at some point, but that was almost 20 years ago.   

That’s okay. True to my wish, I had that one lazy, rainy afternoon, and that was enough to re-discover something I thought I had lost.

House Special: Nick Jobe's Snap Judgements

GUEST WRITER ALERT! Joining us at the House of Nolahn today is my old friend, Nick Jobe. Some of you might remember Nick from his various blogs and podcasts or as a fellow co-founder of Your Face!. Nick has written a couple of books that you can -- and should -- check out over at Ye Olde Amazon. 

Today, Nick talks about managing expectations in storytelling and digs into Avengers: Infinity Wars as his Exhibit A. He'll warn you that there are spoilers ahead when you get close to 'em, but consider this a pre-warning warning.

One of my favorite aspects of fiction, outside of meta-fiction (my favorite), is the twist. I know twist endings have been talkedabout here in the past, including earning it, but there’s a certain aspect of the twist that needs to be discussed here: expectations. When it comes down to it, a twist works because it plays with expectations. You expect the story to go one way and it goes another. Boom, twist. What you don’t expect is that the storyteller is going to mess with those expectations in a way that is overtly manipulative and outside the realm of storytelling, in an almost meta-cognitive fashion, as it were. In Dungeons & Dragons speak, you’d call this “player knowledge.”

You see, when “player knowledge” can interfere with “character knowledge,” the story suffers, the characters suffer, and—ultimately—the twist suffers. This is why the Saw series worked: everyone expected some kind of twist, and each movie even retconned things you learned before, but it did it in a way that worked for the series and built on successfully for the continuity and lore, never damaging the characters or story for the sake of the twist.

In Harry Potter, characters died (especially Deathly Hallows) and it sucked. But there was never a notion that death, or the reader, could be cheated. In fact, the series brought this up a handful of times. The Mirror of Erised in the first book only shows what you want, yet it doesn’t bring it back. In Prisoner of Azkaban, time travel was introduced, but so were rules. When Buckbeak the Hippogriff and Sirius Black could have been killed, Harry had to go back to save them—but because of time travel, they were never really in danger to begin with. They were always going to be saved. In Order of the Phoenix (the book, not the movie), the time turners are destroyed, and so they are out of the picture for the rest of the series. In Deathly Hallows, the Resurrection Stone gives a false hope of life after death. And none of the book twists negate anything learned about previously in any negative manner. As a reader, or viewer, our expectations are never tampered with.

Enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Oh, Infinity War. A lot of things have been said about this movie: it’s a hallmark in cinema, being the cultivation of a universe of characters and stories over 10 years; it’s loud and not much more; it… that ending… that ending. Let’s talk about that ending. Needless to say, there are spoilers ahoy, so if you’re one of the few people who has yet to see Part 1 of the cinematic season finale that is Infinity War, and are lucky enough not to know what happens, step away now.

You have been warned.

Infinity War is a gut-punch of action, humor, and loads of death. But what most people don’t give it credit for is its writing. “What? What do you mean writing? It’s a bunch of action set pieces, one-liners, and a cheap emotional grab.” Sure… but what if it isn’t? What if it’s something… I don’t know… more? The problem with Infinity War isn’t Infinity War. It’s that people are assuming they know what happens after Infinity War. Why do they assume this? Well, let’s go through the thought process:

1. The bad guy wins.
2. Peter Parker, T’Challa, Dr. Strange, virtually all of the Guardians of the Galaxy and a bunch of others all die.
3. Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Dr. Strange were all well acclaimed films, the first in their franchise. Spider-Man Homecoming 2 has been announced, as has Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
4. There is no way Marvel is going to waste cash-grabs like that. They are business first, story-tellers second.
5. Most of the original cast, particularly Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr., have fulfilled their contracts.
6. They will just use the Time Stone or have soul-for-soul transactions of the original Avengers for the new Avengers via Soul Stone.

Well, yes, they’re a business and in it for the money. This is where that aforementioned “player knowledge” comes in. We have these built-in expectations that a story is going to go a certain way not because of story tropes or writing… but because of the film business, money, and marketing. It’s not fair to Marvel to use this against them and their storytelling… though it kind of is. But is it really? Let’s also take a look at some of Marvel’s biggest criticisms over the last 10 years:

1. Almost no good or memorable villains.
2. There are no stakes. Nobody really ever dies. Why should we care what happens?
3. The MCU doesn't take big enough storytelling risks.

As far as #3 is concerned, that has slowly been changing. Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Panther are good examples. The common chant for #1 was “Loki… who else?” Recently, we had Hela and Killmonger, and now Thanos is added to that list. What did these villains have in common? They weren’t entirely wrong. You could see where they were coming from, particularly concerning Thanos and Killmonger. And while Hela was insane, she was kind of erased from everybody’s memories over time, which is kind of messed up. Also… all three more or less win, just not as expected. Hela brings Ragnarok. Killmonger gets T’Challa to share the wealth. Thanos snaps his fingers. The first two didn’t exactly get what they wanted in the way they wanted it, however. So what makes us think Thanos will? Expectations dictate he will, in the end, lose. Player knowledge backs this up. Yet there is a lingering issue, and it’s everybody’s main issue.

That is Reason #2. It's the biggest criticism in all of the MCU. There are no stakes because nobody important ever dies (or stays dead). The writers have said the entire time that there would be stakes to Infinity War. People will die, and they will stay dead, and people will be upset about that. And Avengers 4 is not what you think it's going to be. 

This is the issue people are having with Infinity War: they believe they know what is going to happen in Avengers 4, which will bring most of the characters back to life, nullifying the stakes of the film and just making it a cheap ploy at an emotional gut-punch rather than any staying storytelling device. Even if Steve and Tony (and Thor, et al) sacrifice themselves to save the others, it won’t have the emotional impact of losing Peter Parker. It won’t have the same shock as losing T’Challa. It’s not the same. 

This is, however, why I believe everyone is wrong. 

What if... and hear me out... what if they are really dead? I know, right?! "You're wrong, though. The Spider-Man and Guardians sequels are already in the works, and there's no way there won't be another Black Panther after that success."

True. But I have a counter for you. This might be a stretch, but it would be a stretch of genius and it could garner Marvel an insane amount of respect (or hatred, depending on who you are). Check this out:

1. First of all, what if they either put the sequels out there as a decoy, or they just cancel them altogether. It wouldn’t be entirely unheard of. “Nope. Not gonna happen. They’re still a business, remember?” Okay, fine. (But you said the same thing about Deadpool for certain not getting an R rating. It wouldn’t be good for business!) 
2. Spider-Man: Homecoming introduced the reality of Miles Morales into the MCU. What if the sequel switches gears? They already set it up and have an established character connection with Donald Glover. And with the success of Black Panther, the diversity could be beneficial—there has already been introduced a race-swapped MJ, after all.
3. Other characters have often taken up the mantle in the comics, such as Bucky becoming the new Cap. It has come to my attention that Shuri, the most popular character from Black Panther—far more well received than even T’Challa—has taken up that mantle herself. With a push toward more female heroes in future Phases (Captain Marvel, finally a Black Widow movie, the Wasp), who is to say Shuri can’t become one of the most likeable leading ladies in the new MCU?
4. Guardians Vol. 2 wasn’t insanely well received (outside of box office), though it wasn’t terrible by any means. But I also recall that film briefly setting up a new team of its own including Stallone’s character, bringing together some of the original Guardians. Chris Pratt has himself spoken about Vol. 3, including very recently where he said they will be filming soon. It has been also confirmed by director James Gunn, who also said it won’t be a prequel to Infinity War despite the 4-year gap between Vol. 2 and Infinity War. It has not been confirmed by Marvel, however, and it’s odd to announce this merely a week after Infinity War, which would not be great marketing on Marvel’s part… and it’s the only wrench in this theory. 
5. Dr. Strange 2 has strangely (see what I did there?) not been announced, so every character might not make it back alive.

If any of this is true, and they decided to keep these characters dead, just imagine the impact this film will retroactively have. Just imagine the masterclass of tragic storytelling Marvel just smacked us with. Do I believe it, though? Well, partly. I don’t believe Avengers 4 will retcon that ending entirely. But I do think it might be more final than everyone is expecting.