Breaking Bad, Writing and Netflix

Writing is no doubt a vast and complex field. If as I, and many of the people who are likely to read this will have, you'll know that somewhere along the course of your studies you can end up weaker in one aspect than others. Personally, I know that I came out of University far weaker in Poetry than many of my colleagues. I've struggled and had a long road to work out how to write screenplays too. Of course, I never studied poetry beyond first year. I strongly disliked my tutor and felt that the module overlooked a lot of contemporary poetry. This shouldn't come as a surprise though; before I began studying Creative Writing, I had a contempt for what I saw as academic poetry. The academics it seemed were quick to judge but slow to evolve. There was a huge us and them situation. There I was, a performer who had gone from mewing my poems at open mic nights, to a confident festival and street poet accosting people at festivals with random poems. I knew absolutely when someone hated my work. After enough performances you understand the different between the polite smiles and applause and the 'oh my god we loved it' applause. Every poem I wrote, or rewrote I had an immediate reaction to how well it worked. Yet, when put in front of the academics my poetry was looked down on. I remember one particular instance where a poem that had moved people in performance to tears was criticised for how plain, pedestrian and cliche it was. In that instance the critics missed the point. If you create a familiar character then your audience can associate with that character. I remembered the frustration at knowing that poetry is not just the written word. Yet, when I went to University what did I find? Tutors who proclaimed that it couldn't be quoted or analysed if it wasn't in a published book (excluding of course vanity and self publishing). What, I began to question, about performance poetry?  What of poetry used in advertising? What of Rap? (Whilst not a fan of Rap, it does mean Rhythm and Poetry)

I should state at this point that this is not a rant about the academic structure. Far from it, even if I don't agree with the structure, I do understand it. What this post is about is illustrating some of the difficulties in today's media filled world with teaching 'successful' forms of writing.

Let's take Breaking Bad for example. That show was one I absolutely couldn't stand. It was slow and largely filled with two-dimensional characters (one or two leads notwithstanding). If there were no Netflix, I don't think anyone would argue that Breaking Bad would never have achieved the popularity it has. You see if you read the anecdotal evidence around you come across tales of people who decided to give the second episode a chance, or those that claim you need to get a few episodes in to really begin to enjoy it. That's all well and good, but in the days when there was only broadcast TV such a show would never have been successful. If it wasn't good on the first episode, it got ignored in planning next week's viewing. Of course, it's important to note you had to plan your viewing. Either making sure you were at home or that you could record your shows. If you sat down to watch something you'd gone to the effort or setting the VCR for, and it was rubbish, are you going to bother going to the same lengths next week? Netflix, and catch up services have given us more options though. It seems that people are more willing to sit through more mediocre episodes or shows in order to 'give the show a chance'. Of course the double edge to this sword is that you can end up binge watching entire seasons of shows and losing all track of time. You'll sit there with nothing else to do, no new shows on TV and a weekend free. So on goes NF and you browse for new stuff. A show you always meant to watch pops up and you watch. The first episode's not great, but you want to give it a chance besides which, the next one has already started playing. Why not watch just this one more. Before you know it you've sat through an entire show that you think is middling to fair quality. Half your weekend has flown past and you figure there's no point doing anything now. Why not just begin the next season. After all you're keen to figure out just how that obvious cliff hanger is resolved.

All of this gets me thinking. Is 'good writing' as cut and dry as academia portrays. I'm currently working on a piece of writing entitled The Anti-Lecture I've been through hugely successful examples of poetry, screen-writing and novels and pointed out where these pieces of writing fail to match up to the example of good writing that is held up for us. The fact is that many of the things we're told not to do when studying writing many writers actually do.

Perhaps though this is missing the point. Perhaps these shows which owe their popularity to services like Netflix are good and I'm finding faults where there aren't any? Personally, I doubt it. The really important question though is what do you think?

A week without social networking.

Along with many, many others I've just finished participating in a week long experiment aimed at helping to answer the question: is it possible to avoid social media in the modern world. This has meant not using any Social Network for five days. Yep no Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ or forum based website. Unfortunately, it also extended to no pages where commenting exists. A surprising effect was that this meant no news websites.

I went into this thinking it'd be a breeze, it'd be simple. Oh how wrong I was. At first I sat at my computer joyfully writing with no distractions. I was limited to viewing such a small collection of websites that it just wasn't worth browsing.

Of course later, it got more difficult. I sat down to watch TV and realised that where I would usually pick up my Nexus 7, doing so would make this more difficult. You see everything about our modern smart phones and tablets is integrated (especially on Android OS) all our social networks, all our contacts, all of our hard earned information. Don't worry though, I'm not going to start blabbing on about how information is dangerous and all the big companies don't let us have privacy. I did have to disconnect all the services and accounts that I'd connected to my tablet. Just when I thought I'd got all of them a friend Facebook messaged me. It immediately popped up on my tablets home screen. An unavoidable bit of social networking had got through the net. I contacted the team running the experiment but they simply told me not to worry and to carry on. Apparently slips like mine were a vital part of the data they were collecting.

What these past few days have taught me if anything is not that these services we use are frivolous, but actually that they are extremely useful. I know, believe me I know. You're sitting there going 'duh', but before this week I seriously thought that I wouldn't miss social networks or their like. The fact is though its not that simple. Here's a few of the thoughts that I've had about our communications and usage of Social Media.

Sites like Facebook, while being a serious invasion on your privacy, allow people to be more private in a way. I've never been comfortable asking for people's phone numbers. I've always assumed that if I needed a person's number or they wanted me to have it they'd give it to me. We so often see our phone numbers as private information to be controlled. With Facebook though we are able to provide people with a simple link that gives them as much, or as little information as we want them to have. There is a downside to this though. If we come across something we want to share we used to call (or perhaps text) the information, but what if we don't have that person's phone number or email address? Well it's not really possible. Of course that's a relatively minor problem often the information might be cool or interesting to your friend but ultimately, it's no great loss if they don't get it.

'Some of the information I share IS important' I hear you scream. Of course it is. Huge congratulations are owed to a friend who got engaged recently. Now that is something that I wouldn't of heard about for quite a while. Let's face it, that's a BIG life event, and naturally, I wanted to text and congratulate the couple. It got me thinking though. Previous girlfriends I've been in relationships with have taken the relationship status on Facebook with a severity I've long been perplexed by. Quite frankly to me a relationship is no less real because my status is hidden. Yet with so many different kinds of life events I've spoken to people who've said that it felt 'more real' (or in one unforgivable case 'more realer') once they'd told the Facebook and Twitter world about their event.

Maybe then social networks only have the value we place in them?

Well, I'd say yes if it weren't for the likes of Google+. I know, I'm sounding odd now. Not many people in the UK use G+. Personally I love it. Where it can be difficult and tiring to trawl Facebook or the internet in general for (writing, theatre, sci-fi, special interest) communities, Google+ makes it lot easier. As a result I've missed tons of news that I'd otherwise have read.

Likewise Twitter is often the first place I hear about jobs. Okay, I don't see that many vacancies appear, but I do hear about them there.

My point? I guess I don't have one, but I will say that for everyone who might moan or otherwise get irritated with it, there's a mountain of reasons why social media has now become so important. Sure a lot of it comes down to convenience, but if it wasn't so useful, we wouldn't keep using it would we?

Location, location, location

I've been writing now for many years. I write, it's what I do. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as pen on paper or fingers on keyboard. As I sit here now I'm at a table, in a room surrounded by play scripts. This, I am told is the Writers' Room. Here in the new Everyman theatre there is a room set aside specifically for writers to write. It leads me to wonder why.

Well, if I'm honest I've dried up slightly and am not making any progress with the script I'm working on, so I decided to procrastinate and write this instead.

So why have I spent twenty minutes on the train and then walked ten minutes to get to a place just to write? I could right now be at home, at my desk with the coffee maker on, a tardis full of toffees and ginger biscuits in a tin next to me. Instead I'm here.

For me it's as simple as there not being enough light or circulating air at home. Seriously, it is dire. It's meant that since moving to that house I've needed to write somewhere else. Anywhere else. I used to cafe write in Soul Cafe. There was live music and an energetic atmosphere that gave me the energy and the momentum to continue writing. Unfortunately, the live music dried up and the place hasn't felt the same since.

For a while I tried the library, but the pressure to keep quiet just wasn't conducive to writing. It seems I can find any number of reasons that a location is not a good writing location.

Which leads me to wonder how many other writers have as much trouble as I do? I know that there are some people who do have very specific things that make their writing space a writing space.

And that's it. I have nothing more to write because my brain has gone and crapped out on me. I'm sure I was going somewhere, but now I'm done. I simply cannot write any more. Except this. And this. Oh and this. But that's it. I'm absolutely not writing anything else. No seriously, I know you don't believe me but I'm not writing anything else because I have nothing else to write about. How sad is that though? A writer who has nothing to write about. I'm sure there'd be a good story in that. Maybe a radio play? Maybe there is something in the idea of the storyteller who has told all the stories she knows but they are finally deserting her because she's failed to keep the stories alive by altering them and making them live and breath as unique stories. Of course ideas like that are all well and good but it is when I come to write the damn things that I start and never finish because I decide the idea is stupid. Did that ever happen to you? You know, you start writing then decide that the story is crap and stop. When it happens to me I literally print off the file, then delete the file. Once I've done that I'll rip the paper copy into as many pieces as I'm able to because I know it's crap and it needs to go away FOREVER.

Now, if by some miracle you've read all that you must be bonkers. This rambling is me just making myself write until my brain starts structuring things into a piece of writing that makes sense. Somewhat like this post has. Somewhere along the way I stopped and I wasn't writing properly. Then all of a sudden my brain got bored and was bullied into writing something that vaguely makes sense. Sort of. Kind of. Well, I rarely make sense anyway. I tend to be a bit bonkers and my brain runs faster than my mouth or fingers can keep up so I end up writing things like this.

Yeah. The point of this post is.......erm hang on.......no wait.....seriously, just a minute. The point is.....writing is hard! There. That wasn't so bad.

Not knowing

Except for one very long eighteen month patch, I've worked since I was in school. I've done an awful lot of things in the last decade or so, and yet there's one question that always stumps me.

What do you do?

See it used to be really easy when I started off. I worked in MacDonalds. Simple. Then things got more complicated. I left to study law. One would think then I was just a student, but no, I was dabbling with the internet. I was working on staff on a web community and doing fairly well thank you. I was interviewing people, and writing and moderating the community. It brought nothing in the way of money but it was still a lot of work, and it did eventually bring me actual work. It started me off doing web design. It also kind of allowed me to branch out and start reviewing for a tech magazine. Yep, I was actually a writer. Sadly, I didn't have the foresight to use my own name. The problem became that I ended up just saying IT is what I did. Anything more just became a long winded conversation.

IT has been in the background now for quite a while. If ever I know that in a few months I'm gonna need some money I'll put the feelers out for work. That said since I started studying Drama and Writing, I've not really done all that much work as an IT tech. So I wouldn't call myself an IT guy any more. That just doesn't feel like my job.

Since I have discovered acting and theatre as something I loved doing, it's become even more difficult for me to tell people what my job actually is. I suppose that really it's because I really no longer have one. Sure, I do take on the odd former client or two as an IT consultant, but for the most part that's quite rare. During the summer of course, I was an actor. Seriously, for twelve weeks I was acting almost everyday. Of course it may have looked like three grown people playing and joking around with puppets, but it was work. It was. Honestly! It was work!

I don't feel like I can say that now though. The last paid acting job I had was, well it was way too long ago now. So long in fact I'm getting ansty over the lack of acting I've done. So, as you can see, I can't exactly call myself an actor. It's not really true. I spend most of my time not acting.

Maybe, just maybe this entire post is convincing me that I just ought to take the Dave Lister approach to the question 'Occupation?' and answer 'Bum'.

Martin's Crazy Night

This, my blog is a long neglected thing. I got to a point where I was posting regularly and then I sort to stopped. Well, a good friend of mine, Fiona Angwin, has begun blogging recently. It has spurred me on to recommence writing on this blog. With any luck it'll stimulate my atrophied writing creativity. It seems that when you've spent so long writing when it isn't really for yourself, you get a little limited.

The other night however, I had a burst of creativity. Some would, no doubt, call it madness. Others would wonder why I haven't been committed. A few two nights ago I decided to test the claims on Stargazing Live and see if I could see the northern lights. As it turns out I didn't, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology I had a photography experience like never before. I didn't feel like I was alone.

Allow me to explain. I am no stranger to waiting around to get the perfect photo. On several occasions I have grabbed my camera and run out of the house when it is snowing in order to get some rare photos of untouched snow. Likewise, when I was trying to get a shot of the sunrise I was out in the middle of the night to set up and be ready for those all to brief moments when you can actually photograph the sunrise. The point is, I'm trying to explain that if you are waiting to photograph a specific thing you can end up waiting for hours, on your own and in the middle of nowhere. I suppose I'm also trying to assure myself that it's normal.

Anyhoo, back to the story. There I was, out at midnight on the shore, in the pitch black (away from horrible light pollution) with just my cameras. I've done similar many times before. The difference this time? My Nexus 7. My wonderful tablet. I tend to slip it in my coat pocket and carry it everywhere these days. In fact I'm sitting in a Starbucks typing this blog on it now (albeit with the aid of a keyboard case). You might wonder why the tablet made the difference, and the answer is my friends.

Out, in the pitch black, miles from another human, I was having a rather fun filled conversation with some of my closest friends. Make no mistake, for a brief moment out there, the conversation was flying rapidly and so well that I may as well have been in the bar with them talking in person. It was entirely down to them that I began laughing, joking and with a few bits of stimuli (David Attenborough, Blair Witch and bizarrely a stray dog) I created a little video. Yep, out the shore with nothing else to do I had a burst of creativity.

WARNING: THE VIDEO IN THIS LINK IS EXTREMELY SILLY AND SHOULD NOT BE VIEWED BY ANYONE OF A SERIOUS DISPOSITION!!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzHkyi4TeaM&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Okay, I'll admit that the video is a little barmy, but for me creativity is strongly linked to fun. If I'm being creative  should be enjoying it. If I'm not who else will?

The video of course got me thinking. Maybe I should try a vlog. Maybe I should see if my creativity can be translated into something? Of course the thing is that very few people watch vlogs. In fact as I think about it I don't know many other people who create vlogs, let alone watch them. So, here I am warning you all....

expect more blog posts and....

keep an eye out for my forthcoming vlogs. After all, it'd be nice if someone watched them!