Writing is lonely. You need to write in a vacuum, you need to trust your own instincts and trust that what your brain is telling you is the right choice for your story. But, what if you're mind is trying to fool you into thinking that writing choice you've made is the correct one? Or, what if it is and someone else tells you something different and you go with that or, what if you just come up with some really bad ideas and there's no one around to tell you it's a bad idea or, they're all yes men who tell you your crap doesn't smell.
I think of this as I write, I also think of this as I watch movies or read books. I wonder why the writer made certain choices with the film or story. I will read or see something peculiar and think, "Why did they go that way?" or, "wasn't there someone in charge who told this person this was a horrible idea?"
The most recent example of this came from the movie The Watchmen. I really did love the movie, thought it was almost perfect except for maybe a few things. The one creative choice I couldn't understand was the use of music which seemed to distract from the scenes instead of enhancing them.
The scene that really sticks out in my mind was the first appearance of Doctor Manhattan during the Vietnam war. He was about fifty feet tall walking across a field killing all the enemies and, while they were showing this they were playing "Ride of the Valkyries" which, while a really cool song, didn't seem to fit the scene and I thought it was a bad song choice.
Another example from the movie was them playing "Purple Haze" when pulling back from the bad guy's lair (non-spoiler alert, not going to tell you who the bad guy is!) again, it seemed odd to me and just distracted from the scene. I wondered if anyone stopped for a moment to say, "maybe this isn't a good choice" or if they just went with it.
I think probably the biggest mistake ever made in a movie, book, or tv show, took place over the summer of 1999. We all waited in grand anticipation for the release of Star Wars: The Phantom menace. I could probably write an entire entry on bad choices that were made during the second trilogy but I think I'll just focus on the one that most people agree was simply a bad, bad idea. Midi-chlorians. (Bet you thought I was going to say Jar Jar Binks, didn't you?) I mean. . .what the heck was George Lucas thinking!? At what point did he wake up and say, "Hey, you know, this whole Force thing needs to be explained on a biological level." Maybe it was just the creator over thinking something. Maybe it was something that had bothered him for years, the inability to explain the force, and he needed to do that to clear his own mind, or maybe it was just a really horrible idea. Whatever the case I wished someone had just stopped him and said, "George, you can't explain the force, it's just there and people have accepted that so why can't you?" But, no one did (or they did and he ignored them.) and there you go, we now have Midi-chlorians in the Star Wars universe.
I sometimes wish I had a staff of twenty to tell me if I had a bad idea or not but I don't, I need to judge for myself if an idea I had is bad or not and I always struggle with trying to filter them out in my own writing. I don't want someone to read or listen to my work and say, "well, that's just stupid." Unless I've said it to myself a few dozen times. I can think of a more than one example of my own writing where I knew the idea was kind of out there but went with it anyway for either dramatic reasons or I just couldn't think of anything better or, in a few cases, because I just thought it was a neat idea.
In my novel Ida I had the main character hitch a ride on a comet as it made its way around the sun. I did this by having him and his crew construct a giant net which would wrap itself around the comet, his life pod would be attached to the end of the net and when the comet was caught it would carry him along for the ride. When I came up with the idea I knew it was kind of silly but I decided to see if I could pull it off. I did a lot of research and found that you know, it's not impossible so I did it. The creative reason for it was to get the hero away from the Space Station while all hell broke loose so he could return to become an even greater hero. I do sometimes wonder if I made the right choice there because a re-write would take an awful long time to complete.
In the Arwen Season III: Armada I wrote a scene that still sort of bothers me today. In it the Earth is about ready to be attacked by a large alien force. The Earth fleet was decimated in an early war and they needed the perfect plan to defeat the bad guys. In the story I had Vice Admiral Cook in charge of the defense of the Earth, he and he alone came up with the brilliant plan to save the planet. I knew, even as I writing it, that this was impossible. There would be no way that one man would be in charge of coming up with a plan to save a planet, it would be a committee of highly trained officers and they would spend weeks coming up with the perfect defense but, I didn't have the time nor did I feel like writing page after page of Generals, Admiral, Presidents, and anyone else who needed to be in the room talking about the best way to defend the planet. Not only would that have bored me to tears the reader and listener would have zoned out after a while wondering when the action was going to take place. So, I made a creative choose to have one man come up with the plan knowing someone might say something about it. So far this seems to bother no one other than me.
Right now I'm struggling with a choice I made in the sixth Arwen story. I'm dealing with a thinking computer and I can't decide if it's going to be completely sentient or not. The problem is the sentient computer who is trying to figure out how to act human is so old and has been done so many times I can't add anything new to it but, it's still a pretty cool idea that I'd like to explore in my own writing. I've decided that's the path I'm going down, that the computer is trying to figure out what it's like to be human, it'll make mistakes, it'll act on instinct, and in the climax it'll do something that it thinks is the right choice but in the end it could kill everyone. That's what I'm going with now but the more I think about it the more I wonder if it's a good idea. Again, wish I had a team of 20 to help me with this decision but, as it is, it's something I need to decide for myself.
