brain vomit, here we go

Editing, grammar issues, and a movie review. It's a full day. I'm going to be jumping around a lot so I'm apologizing in advance.

Guys, commas and I have a love hate relationship. Either I have too many, or not enough. Grammatical punctuation: a girl's necessary, yet unlikable friend.

I've asked a few friends to help me edit a short story that I originally wrote for my writing class over the summer. It's been at least eight months since I was last in a real writing critique situation and I've had to remind myself to put my tough writer skin back on.

I have issues with symmetry and aesthetics. I like to have things looking neat and orderly so breaking up text with bracketed notes really goes against the grain. I'm really excited, though. As much as I don't love grammar and the process of critique can be kind of painful, I'm eager to fix those little mistakes and find the best ways to really polish out the rough spots and turn this story from something that I just enjoy to something that really shines on its own.

It's so tempting to pull this piece out after several months and just say "oh, it's fine" but that's not how we improve and polish our work, is it? No, it's not.

Yay writing!

On the topic of grammar, I've been inadvertently and obsessively thinking about the difference between "good" and "well." I'm pretty sure that this is what brought on my little mental debate:

So yes, when someone asks how you're doing, "I'm doing well" is the grammatically correct response. But people use this correct grammar so infrequently that it kind of sounds weird to say it now. On the other hand, the more I've been thinking about this, the more saying "I'm doing good" is bothering me. There are phrases and words in the English language that we've kind of bent to our will, or laziness, over the years. Part of that is a natural effect of a growing, living language, but where is the line? I mean, I get the changes in spelling of certain words and sometimes even a slight change in definition but with "well" and "good" are we really just being lazy? The two words, in the context of "how are you?" mean two totally separate things and it's been getting under my skin recently.

But how much does it really matter? It's like fewer vs. less. Each has their grammatical place but most people don't know the difference or when one is appropriate and the other is not. Do we hang on to grammatical rules like this or are these things in the list of words and phrases that get bent over the course of history?

This is why I'm not in charge of decisions involving this sort of thing.

SPOILER ALERT - Cease and desist your reading if you have not yet seen The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It's for your own good.

Okay, so Tim and I went and saw this movie last Friday and we both loved it. That fact alone is really worth mentioning considering my recent depressing track record of being a grumpy-gus about movies we've gone to see. I think, in part Walter Mitty was just a refreshing break from book-movies that fell flat for me [there is an original short story but there are few enough connections between the two that I wouldn't even say the main character is the same person]. The biggest reason I loved this movie, though, was the characterization of Walter. I can point to a few films or tv shows that have notable characterization [Firefly, Chronicle, etc.] and Walter Mitty has definitely been added to that list.

The thing about him is how real he feels. Story lines like this tend to focus on the main character overcoming a traumatic past, getting a personality as well as a backbone. The result is often the stereotypical middle-aged, directionless, socially awkward, bland type of character. They are stuck because of something that happened to them years ago and they've never done anything important with their life. They don't have any interesting attributes or skills and the plot sets out to reinvent them. The beautiful thing about Walter is that he doesn't need to be reinvented. At the start of the movie he is an interesting character, he just doesn't have much confidence. He is still a good skateboarder, where other writers might have written that scene in the park with Walter trying to show Cheryl's son some tricks and then falling flat on his face. He has an awesome job, even if it is being undervalued. The thing is that he isn't being exclusively picked on in this department, the whole company is basically being let go which keeps it from feeling like bad things only happen to this guy.

While Walter does have a sad past, with the death of his father, the movie doesn't dwell on that. All we get there is his mother's remark that working at Papa John's must have been hard for him, his reaction to Papa John's after his mother brings this up, and telling Cheryl about his father's death. In treating his past this way we actually learn about Walter as a person more than if the movie had turned it into a sob-story about healing the pain of a lost parent. Walter, even as a teenager, didn't think about the connection with "papa" because he was the kind of kid to take the responsibility of providing and just moving forward. Even his conversation with Cheryl highlights the fact that he isn't consumed by his father's death. And I love that conversation for the beautiful portrayal of memory. For Walter, he can't stand Papa John's because of the cups. It's not even something that he can explain beyond that. It's just the cups. And when he's telling her that his father died when he was young he mentions that it was a Tuesday. The fact that they included little things like the cups and Tuesday here make this scene so much more real because our memories work like that. Little, inconsequential details stand out to us and these things really help ground the character.

Walter doesn't become a totally different person, the way he daydreams himself to be, he just becomes more of himself. Everything, his skills, knowledge, friendliness, and courage are in him the entire time. Some people might say that's kind of cliche but I disagree. I think it's beautiful because this is the human condition. We all have different traits and skills and I think we're really meant to become ourselves, to magnify those attributes that we've always had. I think one of the things Walter learns in this movie is that you don't have to be Sean O'Connell, someone who goes flying off around the world all the time, in order to see, or be an extraordinary person. People that we think of in those terms exist in our everyday lives - the Walters, Cheryls, and Tods. You are someone that can be described that way.

Walter does some pretty crazy stuff in this movie and you know what, it all felt believable to me because Walter feels believable. Never underestimate the importance of characterization and making your characters feel real. Brilliant, beautifully constructed characters can make any fantasy story feel real and they will always set a great story above the rest. These are the stories we remember, the films that leave us breathless and mind-blown for years. These are the kind of characters you want in your books.