Embrace Scarcity
When I was a kid, I’d record music off of the radio on cassette sometimes. I didn’t want to bug my mother for money to buy CDs and such. There was always Christmas and my birthday for that. So in the mean time, I’d have my machine ready while listening to the radio.
A few things could happen. If I was lucky, the DJ would mention a song I wanted to save was coming up, and I’d record everything from that moment until the end of the desired song. Bingo, I had the song. Also, if I was close enough and recognized the first moments of a song, I’d hit record. That meant, of course, I’d always be missing that first part of the song, but would have 99.9% of it. That would often suffice for my purposes. A few times I would just turn on the radio and hit record, and then go out and play or watch a movie. Like an audio fisherman, I’d come back later to see what I’d caught, and transfer songs I liked onto a separate tape.
One time I accidentally recorded over the last minute or so of a song I had archived. For several days I set that tape aside, and waiting for the radio station to play the song again. I caught up with the song halfway through one evening, and had an idea. Why wait around for the song to come on again sometime? I hit record, and saved the second half of the song, determined to just splice the end part of this recording, with the beginning part of the original recording. It took some doing, with just my keen ear and my $29.95 dual cassette portable stereo from K-Mart, but I eventually created a seamless copy of the song; I challenged several family members to discern with their naked ear where the splice had occurred; none of them were able to do so.
Pride.
I didn’t have editing machines, and had no money to buy albums, and there was no iTunes at this time. So I got creative with what tiny bit I had available to me, and it worked. Throughout my childhood and teen years, I often utilized a low-budget/few resources/clumsy equipment approach to creating things like movie trailers, “TV” talk shows, mocumentaries and such. There is nothing quite like scarcity to sharpen the creativity and ingenuity of a determined child artist.
Or an adult artist, for that matter. Scarcity isn’t just a weirdo kid like me with no money making an audio variety show for his best friend at the time to listen to at home. I continue to embrace the idea of scarcity, and its cousin, minimalism.
Consider my one-man stage show, The King is But a Man. It debuted at a small black box theater a friend of mine runs. Yes, I had a bit of an “in” there, but the place is small, and has little budget to speak of. Due to scheduling conflicts, I usually had to rehearse late at night, in winter, before the heater was fixed. I lugged a space heater onto the stage each night, warmed up, and sometimes ejected Shakespearean monologues into the air on a train of breath-steam, a ratty stocking hat, not at all part of my costume, pressed over my ears. I’m sure it was a sight.
All this came after months of rehearsing the show within the confines of my own bedroom, a place I assure you is not designed for the purpose. All of this was, in some ways, a pain in my ass.
In other ways, however, it ennobled the artist and performer in me. I used what I had, when I had it, and I’m proud of the result: a play bred of scarcity in more than one sense. Having a full, warm, spacious rehearsal space whenever I wanted it would have yielded a fine show as well, but I can’t help but think I’d have not learned as many things about myself and the material.
Scarcity.
Yet scarcity can be a choice. If I had that rehearsal space and a budget of thousands of dollars, some things about the process would have been different, but the nature of what I’m trying to do with the show would not have changed in any drastic sense. I might spend more money promoting it, but it’s premise would remain unchanged. Why? I choose scarcity of concept and execution to bring out my creativity and enhance the experience for the audience. The late, cold nights were circumstantial, but the minimalism, the scarcity of accouterments and complexities were not.
I’m now in the process of taking that show to other venues in the area, where I’m sure I’ll feed off different, specific scarcities.
In a sense, much of my fiction writing follows this scarcity philosophy. It’s not always the case, but I often set my stories in unspecific places. Towns, cities, whatever the story needs. I don’t usually use a real, identifiable place. That may not sound like scarcity, but consider it further. If I have the entire history of Frederick, Maryland to work with in something I write, and can reference any of its streets or buildings I like, I’m presented with a lot of options. There is the potential to describe the Baker Park Carillon or the soon to be demolished remains of the Fredericktowne Mall. I can feed off of those possibilities in impressive ways, no doubt. But if I remove the various reference points, I have to think about world building a bit more. I’m not heavy on setting description in my writing most of the time, but if I’m creating the setting out of whole cloth, I’ve got to do a bit more thinking, than if I simply set the novel in Chicago, researched the most popular deli on the south side, and describe the real-life sandwich my character gets there.
When carefully executed, I feel an author using scarcity can ignite a reader’s imagination as well as his own.
I’ll always admire foodies who can take scarce ingredients from a mostly empty kitchen and whip up something memorable and tasty. I assure you this is not me, but perhaps this is you, or someone you know. But again, scarcity breeds creativity, and sometimes it’s best to choose that scarcity.
Don’t get me wrong, having a ton of options on any given day can be great. Wonderful things can and do come about with access to large budgets and unlimited resources. I’ll probably write a heavily researched, historically accurate story someday. I wouldn’t say no if someone offered to give me my own theatre building. Still, don’t spend the bulk of your time trying to secure resources, so that “one day” you can do something spectacular. If you can embrace the nobility of squeezing blood from stones in lean times, it will pay off eventually, if not in resources, than in a special kind of satisfaction that isn’t as common when all of your potential needs are met instantly.
Be creative with your scarcity. Embrace it. Channel it. The ability to choose anything and everything about your endeavor is not always a luxury.In the end, having little to work with means deeply trusting yourself, and trust in yourself should never be scarce.
Meet the Character: Archibald LeMay
The fifth and final point-of-view character for my upcoming novel, Flowers of Dionysus is Archibald LeMay.
LeMay is probably not evil by most standards, but he is certainly unethical and even more certainly unlikable. Appointed the interim-president of the Little Dionysus Playhouse by the Board of Directors before the adjourned for the summer, the man seems to have little concern about the nature of community theatre, or the people who spend their time in one. Terse, rude, and not usually cooperative, Archibald LeMay strikes almost nobody as a wise choice to run the LDP.
Only on the job for a short time, he has already alienated actors, directors, volunteers and those in charge of other local theaters with whom the LDP had previously cooperated. It probably didn’t help matters that within a day he redecorated the office of his much beloved predecessor, even though he remains only the interim-president for now.
Why, oh why was such a man given such control over the playhouse?
It seems his genius with moving numbers and the ways of accounting when he was a board member had much to do with the choice. He got the theater out of debt faster than anybody thought possible, thus opening the way for a quick promotion when the previous president resigned for health reasons.
But will the “interim” in his title go away when the Board of Directors convenes again in the fall to appoint an official president? What would such a move mean for the LDP community? And just why is a man that seems to have zero theatrical understanding or passion even interested in running one in the first place?
Discover this guy’s motivation, and other things about him in Flowers of Dionysus, coming out next month.
Even Cliche is Okay. (Sometimes.)
For the most part, avoiding cliche or stereotype is wise advise for writers, especially in fiction, I dare say. Yet something I think the advice is taken too far.
We don’t want our fiction to be predictable, (even though there are supposedly only seven stories, or whatever that BS is.) So we seek to avoid the well known, the often trodden path, the common. We come up with wild names, or give people unheard of hobbies or talents, and that’s fine.
Yet we run the risk of isolating our fiction from our readers or vice verca if everything about our story is obviously foreign or unique.
To begin with, a reader needs to relate to something in our fiction. That something may just be an emotion or a setting, but unless you are going for experimental literary fiction, (which is fine if that’s your thing), it’s not an achievement to write something so unlike the world we live in that nobody knows what the hell is going on in your story. Even fiction set in another world or dimension needs some aspect of our reality to it, if we want readers to get caught up in it.
And let’s be frank; certain stereotypes have some basis in fact. (Note the use of the word “basis.”) Moody goths that wear black all the time do exist. Snooty English professors exist. Meat head athletes exist. Using such tropes in our fiction need not be a sin, if we don’t rely on them, and if said tropes are not the only thing our fiction has going for it. By all means challenge stereotypes as well, but you aren’t a poor writer if you include someone that fit in with a well known image. Fiction can’t be 100% true to every nuance of actual life of course, but don’t let that convince you that every one of your characters has to fight against every single possible grain that could exist in their world.
Sometimes a goth is just a goth, so to speak. And we needn’t discount the value of a goth (athlete, preacher) that doesn’t break the mold.
Baltimore.
I’m a Marylander, but I don’t live in Baltimore. It’s been about two years since I visited Charm City. Yet Maryland is a small state, and many of us, regardless of how often we may get there, consider Maryland’s largest city, warts and all, a major component of the state’s identity.
All that by way of saying that while civil disorder in any city affects decent people, the perspective on the situation deepens when it’s happening close to home. (I’m just over an hour from Baltimore myself.)
What is my perspective on what’s being labeled as the riots in Baltimore last night? My answer to that will likely be as unsatisfying to you as it is to me; I don’t know.
To be frank, I can’t know, with any degree of sincerity, how to approach what happened, (and what may happen again in the coming days) because I have never been in such a situation as many of Baltimore’s poor, and predominately black citizens find themselves in on a daily basis. Nor do I know what, if anything, will make a dent in the problem.
I do know that the unrest didn’t show up without warning. I know it wasn’t a shock, and I know that the actions taken by both the more peaceful elements, and the more destructive groups is not a simple tit-for-tat for the as yet unexplained death of Freddie Gray. Whatever your take on the actions of Baltimore citizens in the last few days, you’d have to be uninformed to a near-mystical degree to conclude that all of this was not part of a culmination of events in Baltimore stretching back decades at the very least. The documented history of the Baltimore Police Department should give any civilized person pause. And that’s just the things people have discovered. No doubt there are at least as many incidents before the days of cell phones and social media that never did, and never will see the light of day, and yet have exacerbated the seemingly systemic oppression and marginalization of an entire demographic.
I also know a line from Shakespeare’s Henry V that I use in my own one-man show. King Henry of the English, portrayed by Shakespeare as “the mirror of all Christian Kings,” has treated the French people with compassion, despite being at war with them. He has ordered his army to do likewise. Yet when, late in the action, it comes to the King’s attention that the French have committed atrocities on the battlefield so heinous that even the laws of war forbid them, Henry takes on a whole new attitude.
“We’ll cut the throats of those we have, and not a man of them that we shall take shall taste our mercy.”
As I point out in my show, we see even a godly, noble character turn savage at one point. Why? Because a line has been crossed within his very soul. We all have that line, and while we may not know the exact nature of what we would do if said line were crossed, it’s safe to say we’d probably not be ourselves. I must at least consider that truth when I look at some of what happened in Baltimore, even the violent actions of the few. For just as an individual has a line, a society, a demographic, a neighborhood, a city and a civilization itself has a line. Much of what we see, yes, even the burning of cars and smashing of windows may, I think, be the result of a soul’s line being crossed too many times on too large a scale.
I do reject the physical harm of people, period. As for the destruction of property, I’d prefer it not take place, and I suspect I would not choose to go that route. But I cannot be certain I would never resort to it, nor can I permit myself to 100% demonize those in Baltimore that do so. Why can’t I? Because not only has my own line not been crossed thus far in my life, but my line is not their line, and I cannot ignore that.
Nor can I ignore the fact that people in such cities, in such social classes, and such races have suffered far more than an inconvenience or an irritation over the years. The recourse for such abuse has been few and far between. I’m not even sure if this is about correcting anything at this point. That’s why the statements of politicians about how citizens are destroying their own communities is a bit problematic; we need to consider that the people who are burning drug stores down are not those who will complain later that they have no drug store. Some of them may be the people, especially the young, who feel they have nothing left to do in a system rigged against them than to say, in as loud a voice as possible, “fuck you all.” That may not be helpful to the overall problem, but in their minds maybe they figure nothing is.
“What about Martin Luther King, Jr?” many well-meaning people have asked. “What about Gandhi?” Many a meme has sprung up over the last 48 hours quoting both men as a means to depict the events in Baltimore of last evening as barbaric. “Look what those famous leaders did without resorting to brick throwing. Shut up and do the same, instead of burning down the city.”
Let’s address that contribution to the discussion in two ways. First, peaceful protesters of the now nearly forgotten Freddie Gray death have in fact been active in Baltimore this week. Close to 10,000 of them in fact. Not to mention the peaceful march of arm-locked clergy through some of the violence. So the Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi approach is not absent in all of this. It probably is not as sexy a story as is a city blowing up, and so it hasn’t been reported as often, but the approach is present.
Yet media interest aside, the non-violent approach of King and Gandhi has been utilized before in such situations, both in Baltimore over the years and in other major cities with similar problems. Yet despite some reforms, true lasting progress on such issues since the death of King himself has been sporadic and sadly temporary. The reasons for this involve socio-economic, political, and even spiritual truths too complex to get into in one post on a blog. Yet I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that while the non-violent methods of these famous men are still used, what is missing are the men themselves, and people like them.
King and Gandhi were exceptional men. Transcendent men in many ways. You get a few of those a century, probably. And they don’t descend from heaven fully made when they do show up. Both men were highly educated. Both men, though egregiously wronged in their lives did at certain key points have access to powerful thoughts, words, history, philosophy. While I don’t think one needs a college degree to be a hero, or to affect change in the world, I cannot help but wonder if there is some correlation between neighborhoods that lack educational and cultural opportunities, and those who respond to oppression in non-King type ways.
I can’t answer the question, but I at least ask it; can we really expect another Martin Luther King Jr. to just emerge under some of these conditions? Though the same horrific problems continue to exist and even get worse along racial lines in the country, we don’t live in the same world in which those two fine men lived. I continue to believe in the potential of non-violent resistance, but I can’t look at Baltimore and its problems and scream, “Go be Martin Luther King, Jr.” at them either. I dare say they are not as worried about emulating a great man at this point, as they are about being heard, feeling safe in their own homes, and being taken seriously by those in authority. If that’s the case, no amount of quoting someone, who to many of them is a historical figure, is going to satisfy the yearning that burns within them as the city itself burns.
As for myself, I tend towards non-violence. I don’t think I would be joining those who are burning the city, and I’d rather not see them doing it either. But I am also not a pacifist. By that I mean I believe that backed into a corner or pushed far enough, I suspect I could in fact use violence. Outside of direct, immediate threat to myself and family, I don’t know what that line is. I don’t believe it would be the same line as those breaking the windows. But then again, despite being poor, I am white, and have lived in rural, white, Frederick County, Maryland my entire life. Though I’m only an hour and 15 minutes or so from the epicenter of this recent destruction, in some ways I couldn’t be more far away from it. And unless I am willing to drive down there and walk into the streets and become Baltimore’s Gandhi, (a task for which I am grossly unqualified), I can’t simply dismiss every single incident of a broken window or a thrown rock as “thugs being thugs,” even if I don’t agree with their actions.
And lest we think it’s all about unemployed black people, let’s recall places like Vancouver, who rioted over not oppression, police brutality or anything else political, but over hockey, statistically perhaps one of the most white sports in North America. In fact you see white neighborhoods riot over sporting events all the time. Just look up “sports riot” online, and see if any images of mostly white crowds burning a city show up. (Hint: they will.)
Civil unrest isn’t pretty, whether it’s King’s non-violent kind, or that which we see in Baltimore, or saw in Ferguson. Like vomiting, it can be an unpleasant, off-putting affair. Nobody loves it, especially if it happens nearby. Yet it is rarely for no reason. It’s an attempt to purge the body of something that should not be there. Just as if an organism is vomiting, there is almost certainly something wrong internally that cannot be solved by holding our nose at the vomit, so does civil unrest like that in Baltimore indicate that there is something seriously wrong with the social system itself that cannot be corrected by memes. When it comes to this recent unrest, if the illness is not cured, one day the symptoms are going to be much, much worse than they already are.
The Lost Works of Ty Unglebower
Only in the last ten years or so have I put specific, sustained effort into writing fiction. I’d kick around an idea here and there before that, but for the most part, starting in high school, I was all about non-fiction such as articles, essays and editorials. I was, and am, quite adept at such writing.
However as a kid, though I was never as obsessed with writing fiction as many authors claim they were in their formative years, I did produce fiction more frequently than I did in my early adulthood. Most of it was the result of school assignments, and most of it is now lost. Some of my writings from those days still stick out in my mind, however.
I don’t remember the first story I ever wrote, but the earliest story of which I have any memory I wrote in second grade. It involved a goblin being defeated in some fashion. I don’t have the physical pages anymore, so I don’t recall most of it.I don’t remember most of it, but i do remember the last sentence. Because the goblin had been defeated, instead of writing “The End” at the story’s conclusion, I wrote “The (goblins) End.” Note that I had no concept of an apostrophe, but somehow had a sense of what parenthesis were about. Don’t ask me how, I don’t really know.
There were more stories, but the next one I jump to I wrote the following year. I had a horrible, nasty teacher in third grade. One of the first indications of her wretchedness was when she made fun of said story I wrote for the assignment in front of the other kids, some of whom of course laughed.
We’d be given this assignment: “What if you were a detective right now? Write about why you’d be the best.”
I wrote of me having plenty of water guns, a bike on which I could chase other kids trying to run away, and a basement apartment I could use for a secret office.
“Come on, you really think it would be enough to just have a water gun?” the old crone asked me in class once I’d read the story out loud, her already pinched face scrunched even further in condescension.
I had, you see, written a story exactly as assigned. What if I, at that moment, were made a detective? The other stories involved the other kids driving their cars down the highway, with real gun and other accessories. It had not been specified to make everything up that I would have wished. Only that if I, as I was at that moment, were made a detective. Such was my first realism piece, I dare say.
In art class during the same year, the art teacher, (who also, sadly, was a mean woman who would mock how poorly I drew and cut out shapes) assigned us to write a picture book. This I believe I still have in a box, somewhere. It was called “Mixed Up Land.” I remember the first line without digging for the box:
“Mixed Up land is weird.”
The story was about this place where the landmarks and national monuments we all know and admire on earth were in different cities and countries in Mixed Up Land. The White House was on top of Mt, Fuji, The Hollywood sign was on an island. That sort of thing. It’s not easy making a White House out of construction paper and memory.
I went to a certain private school from fourth to sixth grade. More than the public school, creative writing was a part of our daily curriculum. Only a few stories stand out now. One was an adaptation I wrote of an old Native American folk story about the creation of the bat. (The animal.) I didn’t know what the word “adaptation” was at the time, but looking back, that is the appropriate term. I improved the dialogue, and made it funnier than the folktale I had heard. No offence to that story’s tribe of origin. (Which I have forgotten.) Like most of this early fiction, it too is lost to history.
As is another longer story I wrote the following year, but I remember having a great deal of fun writing it. The principal of that private school was about half crazy, to tell you the truth. Bit of a wannabe hippie. But one of his strengths was assigning primo creative writing assignments. Each of us were assigned a sea animal we had studied during the unit, and were told to write a story in the form of a log written by a submarine captain, whose mission it was to study the creature. We were also to include some “life on board” posts in the log. I had the sea urchin, I believe.
I would often write my classmates into my assigned stories, and sometimes write stand alone adventures starring me and they, which I would then pass around to them for their approval.
During that time, I worked on what would in comparison be my first novel, called simply, Time Travelers. I wrote the novel long hand in my fat, terrible handwriting, in one of those small hardback notebooks full of blank, lined pages. The story was a partially unconscious homage to the old “Voyagers” TV show reruns which I watched as a kid, with some “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” tone to it.
It starred Sam and Bobby going to different times and getting into all kinds of adventures with historical figures. I never explained how they spoke the same languages. The two of them went to ancient Egypt, England in the Middle Ages, the Lincoln White House. (They traveled with him to Gettysburg to give the Address, which I painstakingly copied down, word for difficult word, in the journal’s blank pages.) They also hung out in prehistoric times for a while. Also into the future for a bit, which they decided to change because they didn’t like the outcome.
My friend at the time, (one of my few) also considered himself a writer, and was writing what I suppose was an action adventure novel in his own little notebook. Though he was reluctant at first, I convinced him, (after much persistence) to cross over a chapter with my own novel. Not a great idea, looking back, but it seemed cool at the time.
Eventually, Sam and Bobby’s time machine got damaged, and they ended up stuck in Nazi Germany. That’s where I left them as a kid, and that’s where they remain; the promised, Time Travelers II, which I mentioned would be “coming soon” on the final page of the journal, never happened.
I did revisit the time travel idea, though. In seventh and eighth grade I moved to a different private school. Not as many writing assignments in that school, though there were a few. One of them was to write a sequel for a short story we’d read in our text books in English class. The assignment came before we read the actual ending. I don’t remember what it was called, but it involved some old ’49er trapped on a disused pulley car, suspended above a ravine. In my sequel, I wrote myself into the story, and saved the man, explaining I’d come from the future in a time machine I’d built. The fictionalized Ty told this guy that in the future, his descendant owed me money, which I would never collect unless I saved him (the old man.) The part I found clever was that though I was a character, i still wrote it in third-person. More humor than sci-fi on that one.
I transferred to yet another school in 9th ninth grade.I wrote some short fiction, (such as a funny parody of that year’s presidential election for an assignment.) Once in a while I even started a novel once or twice in high school, my production dropped for years, until adulthood. I focused more on academic and non-fiction writing. Editorials and term papers, both of which earned high praise much of the time. But for a good many years, fiction was just not on the docket, as it were.
And now it is again, what with my novel coming out soon, my short stories from last year, and several other places I’ve published online for free. I’ve not written as much in the last few months as I like, but it seems that fiction is now a regular part of my writing arsenal for the foreseeable future.
I wish I had some more of these lost writings, though. Sure, in some ways they would be embarrassing to read, as Time Travels is when I can decipher my own writing. But in these stories, written either just for friends, or just for teachers there is something free. Something unhindered by marketing and publishing worries, trends, formulas and audience. In these mostly lost works is a version of this author that though he sought a good grade, wrote mainly what came to him, and made him feel happy, excited or scared as he wrote it. It should always be as straight forward as that.
Actually, it is.
Ty Unglebower 