The Journey of Walter White (Video)

AMC's Breaking Bad has been a master class in evolving characters driving a relentlessly addictive plot. Anyone who wants to write will learn a lot by watching it. This YouTube video is eight minutes long, but it's worth every second. You see Walter White — the central character of the show, played by the phenomenal Bryan Cranston — transform from a meek, beta-type high school chemistry teacher to a fearless, genius alpha male meth dealer who can murder someone without blinking. It's been an incredible story to watch unfold, and this video captures White's journey, completely. If you can't watch the show, at least watch this. 

ReadIt: Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic on Writing

This whole interview, which I found at Medium.com, is full of excellent stuff about writing. A few highlights:

Your ass has to be in the chair to get any work done, so you should put your ass in the chair.

[O]nce I have the story in hand, I don’t like to spend too long researching before I start writing something — a headline, a dek, a few sentences. If I don’t do that, the idea of the story gets too big and perfect. And then when I sit down at the keyboard, I start out, “In the beginning…” When I’m in that mode, it’s easy to forget about the reader, and what questions they might have.

There is no red-tile-roof house on the Aegean where famous writers all go to work in relative leisure. There might be 20 jobs now where you’re set for life, but the rest of us will be hustling forever.

One of my best friends called his big career move “getting off other people’s ladders,” and that struck me as wise advice. You want to write beautiful stories about things you care about? You can do that, so who cares if you don’t end up writing profiles for The New Yorker? You can move around within the profession in more interesting ways than people could before. 

Follow your own curiosity and say the most interesting stuff first. [Sneed's note: The second part of this is maybe one of the most simple and important things I've ever heard as a writer.]

Forget that hypothetical reader and write about the things that are most interesting to you. Then, make it your mission to explain to readers why they should care about this thing you find interesting.

I don’t believe in other people’s hierarchies about what’s important in the world.

Quote: Gene Weingarten on How To Make It In Non-Fiction Writing

This was helpful to me today. From Gene Weingarten's book The Fiddler in the Subway: 

"We are in bewildering times for young people who want to make non-fiction writing their careers. Journalism jobs are scarce, and getting scarcer. I deliver the only solace I can, by telling them what I believe: The art of storytelling is as old as civilization. There will always be a hunger for it. Learn to do it well, and somehow, you will find a way to make it pay.

I tell the most fragile of them that being a good writer mostly means being a good observer and a good thinker, and that, with work, it’s possible to triumph over a lack of innate writing skill. I use myself as an example; I believe I did exactly this.

There’s one last truth that I don’t tell them, because it’s needlessly disturbing and would serve no pragmatic purpose. I’ll say it now, just once, and be done with it. A real writer is someone for whom writing is a terrible ordeal. That is because he knows, deep down, with an awful clarity, that there are limitless ways to fill a page with words, and that he will never, ever, do it perfectly. On some level, that knowledge haunts him all the time. He will always be juggling words in his head, trying to get them closer to a tantalizing, unreachable ideal.

It’s a torment you can’t escape. It will reach even into the comfort of a drunken sleep, and it will shake you awake, and send you, heart pumping, to an empty piece of paper.

If you have that, you can be a good writer. Congratulations, I guess."

ReadIt: 'The Veldt' by Ray Bradbury (Fiction)

Published in 1950, "The Veldt" is Ray Bradbury's short story about the danger of integrating technology too far into human developmental psychology. To read click here. 

(Via Longreads) 

Quote: Lucas Mann on Objective Reporting versus Personal Writing

From this post at Harper's. Curious what the journalists in the audience think. This certainly gave me pause. There are many times I've thought it would be more comfortable to just slip into a first-person account of the story I'm writing, often because of exactly what Mann says here. I definitely consider myself a work in progress as a journalist and as a writer on the whole, and this just made me sit and think for a minute. Curious what thoughts others might have on the subject:

Lawrence Weschler, the great New Yorker writer, has a quote along the lines of, “I like to insert a strong I into what I’m writing not out of some sense of egomania, but precisely the opposite.” I agree with that. I don’t have the hubris to traditionally report on something, then step back, remove my personality, biases, memories, and screw-ups, and speak with authority. I’m the neurotic, often-confused dude who is trying to figure out why all this stuff is important to him, and that crucial, intimate honesty isn’t something I’d ever want to remove from the work.

Read It: 'Defector from anti-gay church struggles with her past' in the Los Angeles Times

Riveting interview with Libby Phelps, granddaughter of Fred Phelps, the pastor of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church, infamous for picketing the funerals of American soldiers and other events with signs that say "God Hates Fags" and the like. The picture above is of Phelps in 2007. Full story here. Highlights below. 

The most killer, heartbreaking line in the whole story, the one that sums it all up? "Libby married in July 2011. Her parents did not attend."

The house was empty, just as Libby Phelps had planned. Slipping inside that afternoon four years ago, she felt as if her heart would burst through her chest.

She peeked through the curtains, terrified that her aunt and uncle across the street would notice the cars parked in the driveway with doors and trunks open.

Moving quickly with three co-workers by her side, she shoved clothes, high school yearbooks, photo albums, a pillow and an old TV into boxes and suitcases. She felt like a thief in her own home. And, in a way, she was.

At age 25, Libby Phelps was stealing her life back.

Libby had grown up with the belief that the world was full of bad people who would do her harm. In the first months of her new life, she was terrified of strangers. She would go to a party and wonder what her parents would say. She would watch people from afar, wanting to fit in but not knowing how. She still has a hard time trusting others.

She was 12 when the picketing began.

It was the summer of 1991 and her grandfather took two grandsons on a bike ride to a park in Topeka. The park had long been a hookup spot for gays. The family story goes that Fred rode ahead and when he circled back, a man was trying to lure the boys into the trees.

Furious, he went to the city and demanded it clean up the park. When Topeka's government did not act, he posted his first sign on a park restroom door: "Watch Your Kids. Gays in Restroom."

In the beginning, Libby saw the picketing as a play date with her cousins. [...] "I didn't even know what a homosexual was," Libby said.

It had never been easy growing up as a Phelps.

Holidays were not celebrated. She was forbidden to date. She could not wear makeup, pierce her ears or cut her hair. As her family's notoriety grew, she realized she was despised. Classmates would move to the other side of the room to avoid her. Her parents told her persecution made her stronger.

"Don't say that. Don't even think like that," Libby recalled their father bristling.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, she said, church members were jubilant, saying God had punished the United States for condoning homosexuality. But Libby didn't feel happy.

Soon afterward, one of her favorite cousins, Joshua Phelps-Roper, abruptly left the church. She was told to never speak to him again.

Libby married in July 2011. Her parents did not attend.

Libby isn't sure what she believes anymore. She no longer hates homosexuality, but her journey is far from complete: "Everyone thinks when you leave you do this 180. It doesn't work that way."

Sometimes she and her cousins talk about reaching out to those they hurt. Libby remembers when the Phelps clan picketed the funeral of a soldier killed in Afghanistan in 2006. He was the husband of one of her favorite instructors in college.

Libby wishes she could explain her past to the woman, but what could she say?

"I guess I would say I am so sorry. I thought I was doing the right thing."

Read It: 'Minds Are The Strangest Thing' by Giles Harvey in The New Yorker

Really fascinating read, this one. Give yourself a minute and make sure you're properly dosed up on caffeine, because it's heavy reading, but worthwhile. A few highlights below. (Bolded stuff was bolded by me, not The New Yorker.)

To catch thought as it flies has long been an ambition of the high-end literary novel. 

Nabokov complained that Joyce “exaggerates the verbal side of thought. Man thinks not always in words but also in images, whereas the stream of consciousness presupposes a flow of words that can be notated.” Nabokov illustrates, and perhaps hams up, these defects in a parody of Joyce in “Ada,” when Van Veen, having left his lover, the eponymous heroine, is travelling to the train station at Maidenhair:

Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the interior monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her “botanical” voice fall at biloba, “sorry, my Latin is showing.” Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poorSalisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now.

This unpleasantly thick verbal stew raises a difficult question: How much thought can a novel contain before bloating, or bursting, occurs? In its painstaking description of thought’s leaps and tics and swerves (“Also smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure”), “Ulysses” often comes rather close to life’s actual tedium; since the heyday of modernism few major novelists have sought to emulate that book’s exhaustive treatment of the ordinary mind at work.

Art is meaningful because it is life-like without incurring the disadvantages of actually being life—that is to say, without being boring and formless. 

The novel may excel, above all forms, at the representation of human interiority, but one reason we turn to fiction in the first place is to escape the interminable shapelessness of our own minds.

Minds are weird, without a doubt. But not everything that goes on in them is worth our attention.

Why 'Rocky' Is The Perfect Movie

Says Script Mag: 

The beauty of this movie is its simplicity. It is not a complicated plot or love story. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl. Boy has a complication (the boxing match with Apollo Creed) and boy has people help him to attain a modicum of success with said complication. That’s it! The truth of good story telling is in this basic formula. This is all that audiences, producers and international and studio financiers really want. Just tell a basic story that is peopled with characters, about which we care, and care, and care.

Quote: Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes) On How To Relax

"We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery — it recharges by running."

— Bill Watterson

Quote: Imagination and What You Deserve

"If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now."

— Debbie Millman

Via this great illustrated essay at brainpickings.