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Avatar: Dances with Pocahontas in Space?

January 30, 2010 by Andrew

Okay, so I finally got around seeing Avatar in 3D at the local IMAX. (Tickets are still selling out a week in advance– crazy!) By now, anything I say about it will be old news, but I’m still interested in analyzing it from a writer’s perspective. We all know it’s a beautiful movie, with amazing effects, and possibly the first film that seamlessly blends CGI and real action. It is, without a doubt, an incredibly well-made piece of cinema.

It is also, without a doubt, incredibly formulaic. I mean, is there anyone who hasn’t seen this movie before?

-An invading, technologically advanced force is engaged in a war with the natives, who embody the idea of the noble savage.
-The protagonist is one of the soldiers. He gets to know the natives, and falls in love with their culture. Also their women. (Well, usually only one woman.)
-The soldier’s commanding officer is an asshole who has no qualms about wiping out the natives.
-The natives’ fiercest warrior doesn’t trust the protagonist’s motives. He’s probably also in love with the woman.
-The protagonist learns the natives’ ways, and realizes that their culture and way of life need to be protected.
-He joins up with them, and helps them fight off the invaders.

It’s a story as old as time. Avatar wasn’t the first to do it, and I doubt that Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, the Last Samurai, etc. etc. were either. And it doesn’t just stop there, either. A quick search for “Avatar rip off” on Google reveals the following scandals-in-progress, in which James Cameron has apparently ripped off previous more obscure works:

Did James Cameron Rip Off Poul Anderson’s Novella?
Avatargate: The Case For the Prosecution
Did James Cameron Borrow From Soviet Sci-Fi Novels?
1985 Comic Looks a lot Like Avatar

Or, for a more general approach:

10 Movies Avatar Resembles

Do I think James Cameron purposely ripped anybody off when he wrote Avatar? No, of course not. James Cameron is like any other creative person: over the course of his life, he’s been exposed to thousands of potential influences. Some of these are other creative works: books, movies, graphic novels, ancient myths, and art of all kinds. Some are nonfiction: history, news stories, magazine articles, biographies, pictures, or conversations with friends. Some are his own experiences dealing with people, growing up, being married, working, and just living life. All these things reside in his memory, and collide off each other like ricocheting particles in his imagination, until a spark occurs, and he thinks: A ha! I’ve got an idea for a story!

Avatar treads ground that has long been tread by movies and comic books of all sorts, and so lots of similarities can doubtless be found– finding that two separate people have come up with similar names, or the same general story arc (particularly one this cliche) is hardly surprising. It may even be that James Cameron did read some old Soviet sci-fi stuff and a decade later, when coming with Avatar, unconsciously remembered some of it and put it in.

If someone were purposefully ripping off an existing work, chances are good they’d change the names, and muddle stuff around so it wasn’t quite so obvious. But really, that’s not how creative people work. Most of us who even dream of doing this kind of stuff for a living have so many ideas we couldn’t do them all even if we did this full-time; the last thing we need is to go through little-known works of fiction looking for obscure ideas to steal. I mean, seriously here. I think, in any case like this, the benefit of the doubt has to be given to the creator, because otherwise you’d have to do so much research to make sure you were being original that you’d never get anything else done.

Anyway, the point of this post wasn’t to defend James Cameron (as if he really needs “defending” by the author of a blog that about five people read). No, the point was actually to explore why he went with such a tired plot and storyline. I think he could have done a much better job of being original, and indeed, I read one article that suggests that the original draft WAS considerably more original, or at least more in-depth and interesting:

The Avatar That Almost Was

The article goes in-depth into James Cameron’s original scriptment, written after Titanic, and the title of it was “Project 880.” In it, the plot for Avatar is laid out in depth, with a lot of additional detail: there’s much more about Earth and its current state, there’s more about why Jake falls so in love with Pandora, there are several interesting characters who are left out of the final version of “Avatar” (including the Na’Vi guide who Grace is sleeping with, and a corrupt bioethics officer with a nice redemption arc that I think would have added a lot to the movie). Granted, turning that script into a film would probably have made for about a 10-hour movie, so maybe that’s why a lot of this got trimmed. Or is it that such a risk was being taken with the expensive graphics and technology that they decided to stick with a completely cookie-cutter plot that people knew and loved?

I think it was probably a combination of both these things. The Project 880 article makes me hope that now that the technology is proven, James Cameron will be willing to tell a more creative story in the inevitable sequel(s).

There’s no doubt that Avatar is a groundbreaking film. It’s just too bad that all the groundbreaking was in the special effects, and none of it in the story. Hopefully we’ll see a better balance in future Avatar films (and other films which will no doubt license the technology). We shall see.

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Getting my Feet Wet

January 30, 2010 by Andrew

Two weeks ago I dusted off my backpacking gear, which has sat unused for over a year, and went backpacking on Shackleford Banks, a little island on the southern edge of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. It’s only about nine miles long by half a mile wide (if that), but it’s a cool little island.

Among other things, the island is home to a population of about 130 wild horses. No one knows exactly how they got there, although one of the more popular tales is that they’re descended from horses that survived a Spanish shipwreck, back in the 1600s or earlier.

The plan was to get ferried across to the island, hike along the beach a mile or so, then set up camp and spent the rest of the day exploring. That part went pretty much according to plan; it was a beautiful day, and the temperature was in the 50s. Pretty nice, considering just a couple weeks before we had a really bad cold snap that sent temperatures into the twenties and teens. So we set up camp behind the dunes, in a nice flat area of scrub brush, and set off down the beach.

The beach was almost empty, except for a few fishermen casting their lines from shore, and even they disappeared as we walked further down the island. My favorite part of the whole trip may have been the massive number of sea shells that littered the beach; there were piles of them freshly washed up, and more conch shells than I’ve ever seen. Most of those were broken, although even the broken ones were pretty in their own artistic-looking ways. Inland from the beach, separated from the pounding surf by a line of high dunes, little patches of forest and scrub brush were able to grow. We saw plenty of wild horses roaming here, and as it got late and we began to make our way back to camp, there were dolphins jumping twenty or three feet offshore, seemingly entire pods of them moving down the coastline and accompanying us the whole way back.

Things got more interesting during the night. Rain was expected, but we were prepared for it; what we weren’t prepared for was to wake up the next morning and find that a storm was incoming, with possible lightning and wind gusts of up to 45 miles an hour. Needless to say, it was a long morning; about half the tents didn’t stay up in the wind, and of those that did stay up, at least one had to be moved when about two-thirds of our campsite slowly transformed into marshland. Luckily, this was all around 9 or 10 am, so it was light and we were pretty well awake. My tent is an ultralight tent, and was one of the ones that didn’t survive, so I put on warm clothes, my rain gear and went for a walk. Heading inland, we found a nice area behind some trees that was pretty well sheltered from the wind. In retrospect, it would have made a nice campsite.

Finally, the rain stopped, and not long after, the sky cleared. We had a sunny walk back to the ferry point, where we were picked up about noon, and after lunch in Morehead City, headed home…the trip was sandy and wet, but fun.

I like getting away from civilization, and I don’t mean little day hikes into a patch of forest in the middle of the city (although those can be nice, too). I mean backpacking in and setting up camp, someplace where you can actually see the stars at night (we probably would have been able to on this trip, if not for the rain), and where you’re really out away from civilization and amidst nature. It’s a great way to focus your mind on something different and get a release from the mundanity of day-to-day work (which has been threatening to overwhelm me lately… stupid deadlines). I’ll definitely be doing more of this in the near future.

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I’m Dreaming of a White… er… Groundhog’s Day?

January 30, 2010 by Andrew

It’s not often that you get snowed in in North Carolina, but here I am. At least I’ve got Internet, power, and water… and as long as the leftover pizza holds out, I should be okay. At least it gives me an excuse to catch up on the blog.

By the way, if anyone from the Northern climes reads this, and laughs about how six inches of snow = “snowed in”… yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before. I’ll post another pic in March when Spring comes, so you’ll have some green trees to admire well ahead of schedule. ;-)

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The Frozen Apple

January 14, 2010 by Andrew

Somehow everytime I visit New York City it ends up being in the dead of winter. I hear the temperature occasionally creeps above freezing there, maybe sometime between March and October, but I don’t recall ever seeing it myself.

Anyway, last weekend I boarded a plane about the size of a compact car, along with my Mom and Aunt and flew to NYC. (Okay, it was a actually a typical puddle jumper for a flight that long, but keep in mind I’m used to flying on 777s). We were visiting my brother, who’s a cast member in the Broadway show Memphis– you can see him second from the right in the Memphis poster below. (Click on it for a bigger version.)


Naturally, the main attraction was to go see my brother on Broadway, so we ended up seeing the show twice. The story takes place in the city of Memphis (duh), in the 1950s. The main characters are a white radio DJ named Huey Calhoun, and a black singer named Felicia Farrell. Huey’s goal is to get her on the mainstream radio (not an easy task in the South in the fifties), so needless to say much of the show is about the racism that was so prevalent back then. But it’s also a love story, and maybe even a cautionary tale about the dangers of fame and pride.

I was very impressed with it– and I don’t just say that because of the family connection. I went in expecting a fairly typical musical with a bunch of songs done all 50’s style (which I’ve never been particularly fond of, to be honest). But I was pleasantly surprised– the musical numbers were excellent (I’ve pretty much had the soundtrack playing on repeat since getting home), the actors were incredible (all of them, not just my brother) and the writing was really good too.

Of course, I always analyze everything from a writer’s perspective… I can’t help it. I look at the characters, setting, and plot, even in a work where the narrative is secondary– like a musical, or a very visually-oriented movie (I’ve been meaning to write a post on the movie Avatar). In the case of Memphis, all three were very strong, particularly the characters, who were heroic, brave, and also clearly flawed, even as you rooted for them. The plot had enough twists to keep me interested, and it ended in a way that surprised me, which is always good.

Interestingly, there’s a kernel of truth to the story– aside from the whole setting, which is obviously based on the way things were, the writers probably had a man named Dewey Phillips in the back of their mind as they were creating Huey Calhoun. Among other things, he was the first radio DJ to broadcast Elvis Presley, and he had to prove Elvis was white to his radio audience by asking which high school he went to. (In the musical, a bigshot radio boss told Huey to prove his race on the radio in the same way.) There are other parallels to explore, but I won’t go into too much depth… don’t want to give spoilers.

If you find yourself in NYC anytime soon, go see Memphis. Or if you can’t, be sure to go see the show when it eventually starts touring, which it definitely will.

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Novel Status Update: Does Mulling Things Over Count as “Work”?

January 3, 2010 by Andrew

Since NaNoWriMo ended, I’ve actually gotten a fair bit of writing done… unfortunately, very little of it has been on my novel. Instead, I’ve been following my muse on little flights of fancy, writing a few short stories that are too far off the weirdness scale to do much with. They’ve been fun to write, at least.

I’ve also been letting my subconscious mull over various ideas for the novel, letting them simmer, occasionally poking them with a fork and turning them over. I suppose this doesn’t really count as “working” on it, but I’ve had a few moments of inspiration, mainly ideas on how to improve the characters and setting.

When I submitted the prologue to my writing group, most people were in agreement that they weren’t able to identify with the main character. This is partly because of how I like to begin stories– fast action sequences that sort of punch the reader in the face and say, “welcome to my world.” It’s probably a result of watching too many James Bond movies. Nevertheless, that’s how this prologue operates, and while I try to mix it with character development and world building, it’s still, at its heart, a fast and somewhat bloody action sequence.

Another part of the problem is that I haven’t been able to nail down the voice of the main character. She’s an assassin, and I’ve had difficulty reconciling her hard-as-nails “warrior” side with her softer, more emotional side, which she needs in order to connect with other characters. So one “aha” moment I had basically involved letting my struggles as an author be reflected in the character. If I’m having difficulty defining her, maybe it’s because she’s having difficulty defining herself. It’s definitely an idea I want to explore; it may also mean that I set aside revising existing chapters and just work on new chapters, so I can practice and experiment more with her voice.

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Happy New Year and Decade

January 2, 2010 by Andrew

Happy New Year, everyone!

There are a lot of unwritten stories to be told in the upcoming year and decade, both on paper in real life. I always find it exciting to reflect on the future, to realize that from here, our lives really are unwritten stories, and we can take them anywhere we choose. That’s not to say it’s easy; consciously changing your own destiny often requires a supreme act of willpower. But I do believe that it’s possible.

The title of this blog is “Off the Written Path”, and this is part of what I mean by it. It’s up to each of us to write the story of our lives; the past may already be written, but the future is not. Where you take it from here is up to you.

A new decade is upon us. May you write many interesting stories, and here’s wishing you plenty of happy endings.

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Fun With Unused Vacation Time

December 28, 2009 by Andrew

I hope everyone had/is having a good Christmas Break. If you’re in the latter category, I fart in your general direction.

Actually… I can’t complain. Despite my Australia trip earlier this year, I had a lot of vacation time leftover at work, so I took the entire week of Christmas off. I’m just bitter today; having to go back to work after a long break does that to me.

It was a fun break from work, although they always seem too short in retrospect. I didn’t get as much writing done as I had hoped, but that’s mainly because I took a road trip instead. I knew I would have to be back in town for Christmas, but I still had a few days of my own to play with, so I loaded plenty of music onto my new Droid and hit the road. This wasn’t just a spontaneous, random trip: the idea had been actually bouncing around in my head for a few weeks. And I didn’t drive just anywhere; I had a specific destination in mind, namely, the Outer Banks.

For those of you not familiar with North Carolina geography, the Outer Banks are a series of barrier islands that run along the coast. You can access them either via ferry or road bridge (although certain sections, like Ocracoke Island, are only accessible via ferry).

I knew it would be cold, windy, and out of season– the Outer Banks are very much a tourist economy, and the more remote sections pretty much shut down during the winter. But the probable lack of tourists appealed to me, and besides, I had an additional motive for going. The ocean plays a fairly large role in a few key scenes in my novel, and I wanted to refresh my memory of what it was like.

Cape Hatteras National SeashoreDespite living in a coastal state, I haven’t actually made it out to the ocean since a trip to Florida in 2006. I wanted to get re-acquainted with the smell of it, the sound of the waves, the taste of salt in the air, the feel of the sand between my toes… maybe not the feel of the water, though. That would be pretty cold.

I also needed to write a couple poems to use as song lyrics; in one of the scenes, a character from an oceangoing culture sings some songs around a campfire, and in my mind, it’s a great moment that connects the emotions of people from two very disparate cultures. But I haven’t actually written any poetry in years, and it doesn’t flow easily for me. Nevertheless, I hoped that by actually being at the ocean, I could get the ol’ brain cells firing.

It sort of worked. I jotted down occasional bits of imagery or description that came to me; I didn’t get any full poems written, but at least I have some starting points.

I also realized that part of the prologue, which I’m currently editing, rests on an invalid assumption. See, I had this image in my mind of the waves crashing one at a time. Wave crash. Silence. Wave crash. Silence. That repeating sequence of noise and silence was a key part of the scene, but when I stood on the beach, listening to the waves, I remembered that, in reality… the noise is pretty constant. Sure, you can pick out the sound of individual waves if you’re right by the water, but even then it’s really just a constant roar of water, punctuated at irregular intervals by crashing waves.

It’s amazing the sort of things that can slip your mind during the carefree crazy days of NaNoWriMo.

Other than that, I mainly just spent a couple days exploring. I spent the night in an oceanfront hotel that was so quiet I startled the desk clerk, who must have jumped a foot out of her chair when I walked in. After that, it took her a few minutes to figure out which buildings had heat and which didn’t, and she spent several minutes explaining how all the restaurants were closed, except for one greasy pizza and seafood joint. On the bright side, I did find a nice little diner for breakfast that did awesome pancakes.

Cape Hatteras LighthouseThe next morning I visited the iconic Cape Hatteras lighthouse, and from the nearby beach I could see a massive pod of dolphins swimming maybe fifty feet offshore. There were also quite a few crazy surfers catching waves (at least they had wetsuits). After that, I hopped the ferry to Ocracoke Island, found some hiking trails, and went for a walk on a deserted beach. It was fun, albeit cold and windy, and even though I didn’t get much writing done, I don’t regret having a little adventure instead. If you want to see the full set of pics from it, click here. (The Droid’s camera has gotten a bad rap, but I was fairly pleased with it.)

Now that I’m back, and Christmas is over, it’s time to get writing again. More on that in my next post.

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Droids: Not Just For Star Wars Anymore

December 16, 2009 by Andrew

I got me a new toy this weekend: my first-ever smartphone, a Motorola Droid. It’s been a while since I’ve bought a new gadget to geek out on… in fact, I usually avoid buying new technology. My laptop is over two years old, my most advanced gaming console is a PS2, and my TV is a 27-inch CRT from Wal-Mart. For someone who makes his living developing software, I’m actually quite the luddite.

This year, I decided the Droid would be my Christmas present to myself. My contract with Verizon was up, it was time to upgrade, and I didn’t particularly feel like switching networks. Alltel (now Verizon’s) reception is great in my area, and while the iPhone intrigued me, that would require switching to AT&T. I’d rather chew glass, thanks.

So I got my new toy and have been geeking out over it ever since, trying different apps, playing with ringtones, widgets, and generally customizing the heck out of it.

Of course, being a writer, I immediately wondered if it would be feasible to use it for writing. The pull-out keyboard seems to be decent, but I don’t see myself doing much writing with it. It’s no substitute for a laptop… or even a paper notebook. I can write with a pencil faster than I can type on the phone, and even though that would likely change with practice, I don’t see using the Droid as a substitute for the spiral notebook which I carry pretty much everywhere. I like being able to sketch maps, freewrite, doodle, make lists of seemingly random ideas, and for now, pencil and paper remains a friendlier interface for me. As for actual writing, I’ll probably stick with my much-more-comfortable laptop, although I could see myself writing with the Droid if I ever had a sudden brainstorm and it was all I had with me.

I do look forward to using the voice recorder widget, which is something I wished for on my previous cell phone but didn’t have. I go on walks a lot, and ideas often come to me, but I have no easy way of writing them down; I have to remember them until I get home. At times I’ve almost bought a mini-cassette recorder, so I can easily record ideas and passages while I’m on walks, but never did… now, I can just use my phone. I can also easily use it while driving, another place I often get ideas. (What’s that, you say? Using a phone, even in that capacity, is unsafe in a car? Yes, you’re probably right, but it beats the pants off trying to write something down.)

I haven’t seen any other apps in the Android Market that have made me go, “Wow, that would be useful for a writer!”, but if anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

Now, I just to need to stop playing with my phone when I should be working on my novel…

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Post-NaNoWriMo Letdown

December 10, 2009 by Andrew

My final word count for National Novel Writing Month ended up at 59,117 words: a hair short of my personal goal of 60,000, but well over the official goal. I suffered from a precipitous drop in motivation near the end; I don’t think it’s because I passed the 50,000-word mark so much as I was losing track of where the characters were going. I mentioned in the last post that I was probably going to go back and do some editing on what I’ve written; now I feel like that’s a necessity.

During NaNoWriMo, I was sort of (sort of? how about totally) making things up as I went, and so the characterizations and setting details in particular tended to vary from scene to scene as I tried out different things. Now I want to go back and eliminate some of that, or else I don’t think I’ll be able to write the rest of the first draft, even if it is just a first draft.

I think that’s because of how I learned to write. Most of my longer stories up to this point have been fanfiction, where I would post a chapter at a time to the web, then get to work on the next chapter. So even to this day I have this overwhelming urge to make sure each chapter is in at least a readable state before I go on to the next one. Sort of like building a tower: you want to make sure that each level is secure before you move on, or the whole thing is going to collapse in a rickety mess. I know for others, a first draft is just sort of like throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, but I don’t seem to work that way.

It’s been tough getting motivated post-NaNoWriMo, though… not sure why. I think partly it’s seasonal; December always tends to depress me. That’s partly because of the short days (I like sunny evenings), and partly the incoming holidays and New Year. (Yeah, I know, call me The Grinch. In a few years I’ll probably move to a mountain cave and spend my time plotting against the Whos.)

A messed-up sleep schedule hasn’t helped, either. My body still apparently remembers many productive writing sessions between 1 and 3 in the morning, because that’s still when my energy naturally peaks.

Oh well. For now I’m chalking up these last several days to “recharging the creative batteries.” I read the prologue of my NaNoWriMo novel to my writing group this evening, and got some good feedback, so hopefully that’ll spur me on to doing some editing.

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NaNoWriMo Day 26: Happy Thanksgiving, and Victory!

November 26, 2009 by Andrew

A couple days ago I crossed the 50,000-word threshold for NaNoWriMo– yay! Tonight, after reaching 52,336 words, I uploaded my story to their word count program, and my progress bar on the NaNoWriMo site turned purple, so it’s official. I even got the nifty web badge for my blog. (Okay, so it’s not exactly riches, fame, and women throwing themselves at my feet, but hey, it’s a start.)

But it’s also very much a case of “you’ve won the battle, not the war.” The other goal of NaNoWriMo, to finish a draft of a novel, is far from done, and won’t be done until well after the tail end of November has passed by. I’m thinking the first draft will be somewhere between 100,000-150,000 words, probably more toward the large end of that estimate. I might be done with the first draft by the end of the year, but it’s a pretty big “might.”

This story is already the longest single work of fiction I’ve ever written. I wrote a couple pieces of fanfiction over the course of a year or two in college that are almost as long; now, in less than a month, I’ve written an original story that’s even longer. Before this, I wasn’t totally sure I had it in me. So just for that alone, NaNoWriMo has been great. But soon I won’t have NaNoWriMo to motivate me, just a desire to see this story through to the end, and to improve my writing skills as I do so.

I can sort of divide the overall structure of the plot into 6 parts. My goal is to be done with the first 2 parts (plus a 5,000-word prologue) by the end of this month, which looks pretty feasible, particularly with a long weekend here. Then I may take some time to edit that, and make sure I’m comfortable with how the story is shaping up before I embark on doing the rest. I don’t want to pause too long… it would be too easy to lose momentum, so even while I’m editing I’ll still probably try to keep up a 1,000 word a day pace for writing new stuff. In fact, that’s my long-term goal– to sustain 1,000 words of new material a day on whatever project(s) I happen to be working on at the time.

Come December, I’m also going to be re-submitting rejected short stories to other magazines (something I’ve neglected during NaNoWriMo), and also picking up work on the blog. So it’s gonna be busy. But NaNoWriMo has energized me, and I’m looking forward to it.

And, oh yeah, I almost forgot– Happy Turkey Day!

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