tomorrowandstilltomorrow

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Here’s a fun little exercise that I recently came up with: If you are a writer who struggles with descriptions, and really enjoys dialogue instead, try writing a story that centers around a very personal, direct interaction between two people, but write it without a line of dialogue. In other words, write a scene that you usually would build around the dialogue, but force yourself to not write a single line of dialogue. Extra points if you’re in third person. 

This creates a scenario where you have to scour your creative mind for any sort of material to tell the story, and forces you to tell the story through the actions of the characters, the scenery around them, and their feelings. It also forces you to advance the plot with descriptions. You can’t rely on the voices of your characters to move the plot forward. You have to use your narrative voice to do that. 

I’ve been doing this with a little short story recently, and it’s been really good for me. I’m not a writer that relies too much on dialogue, but I do struggle with taking my time to slow down and take a look at things, and this exercise has kind of helped me with that. I might publish the short story here when I’m done with that because I’m kind of proud of it so far

#creative writing #writeblr #Writing tips

[tomorrowandstilltomorrow]

The Importance of the Long Sentence

Over the past few years, I have become infatuated with the American author William Faulkner, and if you know anything about American literature, you will know that he is not known for being particularly easy to read. The primary reason that is often cited as to why he’s so difficult to read is his inability to end a sentence. I have read nine of his novels, currently on my tenth, and while his lengthy sentences are more prevalent in some works than in others, they are pretty much widespread across his writing. And while his long-sentence problem is a huge turnoff for a lot of people, the length and scope of his sentences are what sucked me into his work. I started to ask “why do these sentences work?” and “why did Faulkner love these beasts; why did he opt for a sentence of five hundred words instead of many more, shorter ones?” These questions eventually led me down the rabbit hole of sentence crafting, and that’s what I want to talk about today. 

When you really break it down, the fundamental building block of prose is the sentence. Yes, you can break sentences down further into clauses, and further into words, but those alone don’t carry full ideas, and breaking a sentence down into those smaller bits is completely pointless, and removes meaning. The smallest thing that carries cohesive ideas is the sentence, and because of that, being able to write a sentence is crucial to being a good writer. An idea I really like is the philosophy that an author’s job is to persuade the reader to read the next sentence, over and over again, until they read the last sentence. The idea is pretty reductive, I will admit, but it still goes to show the importance of writing a good sentence: if one sentence isn’t good, then the reader might not decide to read the next one, thus putting down your work for good. You can compensate with things like a really good plot, or a particularly good philosophy, but in general, you have to be somewhat good at crafting sentences, and the writer that is a master of the craft are the writers that are masters at crafting the perfect sentence. 

As a master sentence crafter, you have to be flexible in what kind of sentences you can create. Yes, short and simple sentences have their place in a novel or story. They’re kind of necessary. They have a sort of utilitarian role, acting as the glue that puts everything together, but they’re also boring. A few words and then a period, while it works, and might be necessary to tie two ideas together, there isn’t really much there to analyze. They’re there because they need to be there. But the long sentence, and I’m talking sentences that range from eighty to one hundred to a few hundred words long, that’s where we can have some fun. 

In Alexie Sherman’s fantastic essay “Superman and Me”, he describes the paragraph as being a fence for words, and by the same token, I equate the sentence as a fence for an idea. A short sentence puts across an idea, yes, but not a very complicated one. A short sentence is a small yard, and the idea doesn’t have very much room to graze. But once you expand that sentence, you give your idea much more room to grow, develop, and you might even be able to fit more ideas in there, and all of those ideas play off each other, creating an even more complex idea, and then you start to build sentences with entire theses, themes, and so on. The long sentences just give you more room to communicate your ideas. When you start writing a sentence, you are beginning an idea, and that idea has to end somewhere, and we mark the end of the idea with a period, or a full stop. When you start writing a sentence, if you put off ending the idea for as long as you can, you give yourself so much more room to breath, and so much more room to develop the idea, and that can be extremely helpful when you get to an extremely important idea that you want to either flesh out and explore to a really deep extent, or an idea that you find particularly attractive artistically, and you want to be extremely vivid with it. Long sentences give you room to be an author. 

Long sentences are also a great place to let yourself run free and experiment. I recently put up a post showcasing my favorite passage I’ve ever written, and that passage is filled to the brim with long sentences, the longest of which is two hundred and ten words long. I will get to discussing why that passage in particular is rife with sprawling sentences, but the part I enjoyed most about writing that passage is how much emotion I could communicate when I told myself that I wanted to keep sentences going for as long as I could. The space that I gave myself allowed me to flex my writing muscles, and showcase what I can do as an author. I got to play around with rhythm, diction, stream of consciousness, and that freedom I gave myself is mostly why it’s my favorite passage I’ve ever written. 

So that leads to the question: when and where do you give yourself that freedom to write sentences that would give a High School English teacher an aneurism? I do not think there is a definite answer for this, but I think there are a few good guidelines to follow. However, a good author (you) just knows when and where to do most things, so if your gut tells you that the next sentence you write should be extra long, do it. More often than not, it works. 

First of all, an extra long sentence should be used to break up monotony. A big part of being a good author is writing sentences of varied length, and every now and then it’s best to just throw in a sentence that probably could be split down the middle, but isn’t. When we write, we don’t write a bunch of sentences of the same length. If we did that, the writing would sound extremely unnatural, choppy, and just plain bad. So in order to combat that, we semi-randomly mix short and longer sentences together. That creates good flow. But in the greater scheme of things, sometimes the simple and compound and shorter complex sentences can themselves start to feel monotonous and repetitive. So as a remedy, it’s really good to just throw in the occasional sentence that is there just to be long. That goes a surprisingly long way in making your writing feel more natural. 

Taking this idea one step further, something I love doing is juxtaposing short and extremely lengthy sentences. In my favorite passage, you might notice that it starts off with a few sentences of similar length. In the full passage, which starts a little earlier than where I started in that post, there are even more really short sentences, which are all somewhere around five words long. The very depth of Alzheimer's is characterized by just not being able to think, and barely knowing that you exist. That’s the narrator at the end of the book. But another characteristic of Alzheimer's is a sudden burst of clarity and consciousness briefly before death, and that’s what I wanted to communicate. So after the narrator spends a few paragraphs slowly churning out simple thoughts, the sentences suddenly explodes into these long, winding sentences that weave in context from the rest of the plot, and he can suddenly remember and feel, and the complexity of all that is so much that he has to spend these sentences, some of which total up to two hundred words, explaining that. 

Another occasion in which you might want to expand your sentence is when you have an idea you think is worthy of a lot of exploration, or an idea that just needs a lot of space to marinate and develop. Again, this is kind of a thing that’s up to the author, and is something that you just have to feel, because there’s always the alternative of using multiple sentences to develop a thought or idea. Why spend a really long sentence, potentially losing readers, when you can simplify it and cut it up into smaller, more digestible chunks? This is a very good question, and one that I don’t really have an answer to. To me, it’s just this self-evident thing, and I just know when I should let a sentence just go. It’s really something you have to learn by both writing and experimenting yourself, or reading authors that know how to do it. That’s part of the reason I picked up the habit of writing long sentences. I read way too much Faulkner, and I eventually absorbed this instinct on when and where to write a long sentence, as well as how to write them. 

Probably the most obvious place to use long sentences is when you’re going for a stream of consciousness. The longest sentence I ever wrote was seven hundred words long, and was a stream of consciousness from a manic and drunk man. That was purely an experiment, and I don’t think it’s really good, but I’m glad I did it because it demonstrated to me both how to keep an idea flowing for as long as possible, as well as the difference in how we think and how we read. Humans do not think in sentences. We do not think like we read, where we start one idea, finish it, and then move onto the next. Even the most neurotypical person does not have a thought process that is as one-track as that. I will admit that, as somebody with ADHD, I am generally better at keeping a thought going and making connection after connection and association after association, but we all do that to some extent, and sometimes authors want to mimic that, creating the stream of consciousness writing style. Pure, untouched, raw stream of consciousness, like that found in the end of Ulysses and the entirety of Finnegan’s Wake, is extremely difficult to read, and is also really hard to write. That’s why, nine times out of ten, it’s best to borrow some of the things that make stream of consciousness interesting, while still staying traditional. That’s what I did in my favorite passage. I employ a stream of consciousness style, while not full-sending it. I still want the audience to know what’s going on, so I use sentences that are long, but sentences that still end in a rational amount of time, unlike the last chapter of Ulysses. Faulkner did a similar thing, particularly in Absalom, Absalom! where he used a style that felt like stream of consciousness, but in context was actually people telling the story of Thomas Sutpen.  What this did was create sentences that are now infamously long, which serve the purpose of intentionally muddying up the story, making it harder for your brain to follow, imitating how stories change and mutate over many retellings. 

The last question left to answer is “how?” And again, that’s not something I can really answer in its entirety. The best way of learning how is to read, and see how the masters do it. If you read enough, you’ll pick it up. But there are some tips that I can leave you with. 

Let your brain take the wheel. Let it wander wherever it pleases, and write about wherever it goes.

If you come to a point where you think you might put a period, always ask yourself “is there something that I can elaborate on? Is there some way I can put a comma or semicolon instead of a period?”

Detail, detail, detail

Subclause, subclause, subclause

Only end the sentence when you feel like putting a period on the page will feel like a gut-punch to the reader.

#writeblr #writing #Writing tips #creative writing #fiction writing

[tomorrowandstilltomorrow]

My Favorite Passage I’ve Ever Written

Over the past few months I have been slowly piecing together the beginnings of a novel I one day want to finish, but with a mix of my ADHD and the difficulty of writing both the subject matter and in the style that I want to write it, progress has been intensely slow. However, one of the first things that I wrote for this project was the end, so I wanted to post that here, with a little bit of context. 

The project is by and large a retelling of my Grandfather’s life, who passed away from complications due to Alzheimer’s in late 2020. Before he started losing his memory, back in 2002, he wrote and privately published a memoir amongst our family, of which I got a copy. Using his memoir, my memories of him, and a bit of creative liberty, I came up with the idea to retell his life, as well as his gradual descent into Alzheimer's, at the same time, as I find Alzheimer's terrifying, but also something rarely explored in art. He also is the single most remarkable man I have ever met, and wanted to retell his life. 

One of the first things I wrote on this project was the final scene, where the narrator finally dies, after being tortured with the inability to feel and remember, for months on end. So, here is one of my favorite passages of prose I have ever written: 

“My mind swims in darkness. I cannot feel my arms. I cannot feel my legs. At least I remember what those are. I think a carpet is at my feet. I cannot feel it in between my toes. I cannot feel the carpet, and my world is darker than dark. But, in the darkness, there is a faint blip of color–of sensation and feeling, which explodes into a light, not angry and red and powerful like the light of the angry sky at dusk, but instead warm and welcoming, which presents a figure that stands above me in the retirement home which I have spent my final months in, a figure which is familiar to me: a figure that I married so many years ago, who died silently in her sleep in a recliner at my daughters house, a figure who welcomes me with opened arms, and a figure which I approach with my own open arms, arms that I can now move and feel, walking towards her with legs that I can now move and feel, and I feel the soft, curly carpet between my toes, and I feel it give under the weight of my fragile bones, and I feel Adelade’s warmth as I embrace her in the first hug I have given her in the years since her death, and for the first time I can feel. I can feel her, I can feel my own self, I can feel happiness and sadness and all the emotions now that she is there in front of me, softly holding me in her delicate arms, a softness which wells an emotion up inside me–one that I missed so dearly, and I sob. I can feel the tear running down my cheek, and it makes me happy to feel that again. I took for granted feeling after wallowing in the nothing that I had existed in for so long, and I never thought that not feeling, swamped and suffocating in a darkness and confusion so thick that I forgot how to forget, would be so terrifying, so numbing, so cold. I forgot how to feel for so long, and now I am here, in my wife's silent arms, crying, and I can feel those tears. In her embrace I see the memories flashing before my closed eyelids, the memories blurred by the tears I shed, and I can see it all: the Speights farm, the New Hope school, the dust and the dirt, the angry sky, our ramshackle hut, the fishing club, my broom closet at college, my wedding, Adelade dressed in the most beautiful dress that I had ever seen, and still the most beautiful woman in the most beautiful dress I could imagine, my time with her, my time with my son, my daughter, their kids, my time working as a professor, my roll of crisp fifties, I see it all, and I feel alive again, with my memories that I had lost long ago, again indexed in a way where I could recall anything that I wanted when I smelled a smell or tasted a taste or saw an object that reminded me of the colorful past that I had once lived that experienced a gradual fade to black over the past years, until that black faded away into a nothing that I could not even perceive. I back away from that hug to see her face again, and she smiles at me, her hands on my shoulder. Oh how I missed that touch. She does not speak. She does not need to speak. She is here, and I know that she is, and that is the most I could ever ask for. She takes a hand off my shoulder and takes my hand and laces her fingers in between mine, and we walk to the other side of the window, a place where we never even thought to look, a place we were scared to see, a place we could not comprehend. 

She does not talk. And I’m okay with that. I remember who she is, I know who she is, and she is here with me for the first time since I started forgetting, and that is the most I could ever ask for.”

#writeblr #writing #fiction #creative writing

[tomorrowandstilltomorrow]

A Tip on Writing Creatively

Here’s a misconception that I think a lot of aspiring writers and authors have: that every published novelist has had every idea for their novels just appear to them out of the ether–that every author that has published a work had the entire idea, fully formed and developed, just pop into their head. That could not be further from the truth, as I have learned. Creativity is not some God-given gift parted upon lucky individuals from on high. Instead, I fully believe that “creativity” is a skill that can be learned just as well as the most practical of professions. 

I think a major roadblock a lot of beginning writers have is that the ideas they have are not quite enough to go anywhere, but they have so many of these little ideas, they get discouraged that they will ever finally find that one big idea that will finally birth a novel. In reality, the writer already has that big idea, they just haven’t put it together. Every writer has all of those little ideas, those little fragments that don’t amount to much on their own. We are always collecting them, like how a kid collects cool looking rocks and puts them in a shoebox, and by the end of a certain period of time, we’ll end up with a shoebox full of little ideas, kept wherever you choose to keep them: your mind, a notebook, a document on your computer, or on sticky notes on your wall. 

What separates somebody who aspires to write, and somebody that everyone will see as a truly creative person, however, is that the “creative” person knows what to do with all of those little pieces, because they realize that the larger idea is hidden in those little ideas. Because very rarely does anybody have the full idea just materialize into their head all at once. Instead, the “creative” writer understands that there is a bigger idea, and that they have to craft it. 

An idea that can write a book is an idea that came from the melding of many smaller concepts, scenes, themes, characters, and situations that the author has accumulated and curated over time. The very beginning of the writing process for that author, therefore, is not writing the first sentence, but instead is looking at their collection of ideas, and deciding to do a bit of analytical and logical thinking. It’s a bit like solving a puzzle, where not all of the pieces are a part of the solution. The author might take a single piece, and compare it to each and every other piece, one by one, seeing if they, first, are from the same scene, and second, fit together snugly. 

A piece of advice that I partly love and partly hate, comes from Stephen King, where he says (paraphrased) that a writer should not keep a notebook of ideas, because the best ideas worth writing should not have to be kept in a journal to remember. Part of it I like, which is to say that the best ideas are the ones that stick with you, but that doesn’t mean that you should let yourself forget the ideas that don’t stick out to you. Sometimes, good ideas need context. Think of the really good, attractive idea, the one that has stuck with you for years and years, as the piece that you start with. You take that one piece of the puzzle, and compare it to every other idea that you have in your collection, and sometimes, two pieces might fit together. 

Another concept that a lot of writers need to understand is that, if you don’t write, you won’t get better. Numerous authors have the misconception that in order to publish a creative work or a novel, they have to first learn how to write the novel, which in part is true. To write a good novel you have to understand how it, as an artform, works, but a lot of people take that advice to mean that they have to do what authors like Brandon Sanderson have done–that they have to write three or four or five novels, and scrap all of them, before publishing one. This misconception paralyzes people, and causes them to not write at all, because writing anything other than their first novel is wasting words. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. 

Instead, what the “good” author does is returns back to their collection of ideas, and takes one that they find rather attractive. This time, instead of comparing it against all their other ideas with the intention of making the basis for a new novel, they just take this one single fragment, this single scene, or character, or simply a single vibe, and write with it, without a single intention of making a finished product. They write simply to practice. What happens then is, once the author starts writing, once the author starts putting words to the page, the idea suddenly expands. It becomes more than just the little fragment, and evolves into a fully fledged piece, maybe it performs mitosis and becomes a few pieces. 

Writing, and putting these little fragments that could never stand by themselves as even a short story to the page is the most efficient thing you can do, because at the same time, you are becoming better at writing, and you are nurturing a single fragment into something much more mature and capable. Once you start writing, more ideas tend to just fall out for free. And once you finish writing that little segment, you have something that you can incorporate into a future, larger work of yours. You just saved the future you the stress of having to write that hundred-or-so word passage, because, with a little retooling, you can just slot it into your manuscript no problem. 

Creativity, at its core, is being able to solve an open ended problem. It is asking yourself “I need a concept that I can turn into a book,” just like how an employer might ask you “I want you to come up with three ideas on how we can improve profits next quarter.” A good employee does not just sit around, waiting for the solution to fall into their lap, they work, research, and think critically to solve the problem. We as authors need to do the same. 

#writing #writing tips

[tomorrowandstilltomorrow]

My Complicated Relationship with Violet Evergarden: The Movie

Something that you should know about me is that I am not good at picking a favorite thing, especially when it comes to things I’m most passionate about. Favorite book? Depends on a lot of things. Favorite tea? Couldn’t tell you. Favorite song? Changes by the minute. So when I say that something is my absolute favorite piece of {x} thing, you can assume that it is extremely special to me, and that there is something about that thing that holds it miles above any other piece of {x} thing. Enter the star of this post, my absolute favorite anime of all time, Violet Evergarden. 

I actually don’t entirely remember how I found VE initially. My best guess is that it was a Christmas or some sort of holiday up to my grandmother’s house, and I needed to download something from Netflix onto my iPad, so I just chose a random anime I thought looked vaguely interesting and downloaded it. Lo and behold, when I started watching it, I absolutely fell in love. 

For those that are unaware of Violet Evergarden, which, if I have a good understanding of the wider anime community, is a good chunk of you, the basic gist of the show goes like this: the show takes place in a fantasy/steampunk world that’s really vaguely defined and thus hard to describe, more specifically in the nation of Leidenschaftlich, which is undergoing a civil war. Violet, an orphan, is found by the Leiden army, and they find that she is anime-protagonist levels of good at combat, and turn her into an emotionless, obedient weapon for the war. She falls under the command of Gilbert Bougenvilla, the brother of the man who discovered her, Dietfried Bougenvilla. 

Gilbert gives Violet her first name (the surname comes later), teaches her how to read and write, instructs her to write regular reports to him, and, most importantly, gets her to work with the army, killing many, many people. It isn’t until an extremely risky and dangerous raid on a hilltop fort goes unsurprisingly awry, and Gilbert get brutally and fatally injured (as well as Violet, with her losing both of her arms in an extremely gruesome scene, like genuinely this scene is on Evangelion levels of uncomfortable) that the horrors of war are truly revealed to Violet. While Gilbert is dying on the concrete, with the war raging on around them elsewhere in the fort, Gilbert tells Violet “I love you,” words that she does not understand, as she was raised without the capacity to understand most emotions. 

The seizing of the fort practically won the war for Leidenschaftlich. The costal city of Leiden became the capital of the nation, and people are now free from the ravages of war. Violet wakes up in a hospital, both of her arms gone, with bionic replacements in their stead, and we finally start the show. Yeah, that’s all the stuff that happens before the first scene in the show. This first scene we see is Violet waking up in the hospital. 

The show itself follows Violet, who is taken under the wing of the Evergarden family, hence the full name, as she get a job at a postal company in Leiden, CH Postal, as she works as a ghost writer for the population which largely does not know how to read and write. Through this job, she slowly learns how to feel emotions, in her quest to understand what “I love you” means. 

Okay so that’s the basic gist of the show, so why am I writing about it, and why is this post as long as it is? Well, that’s because this show has a little bit more to it than just the show itself. On top of the original thirteen episode run, there is a fourteenth OVA special, a spinoff movie called Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Automemory Doll, and, most recently Violet Evergarden: The Movie. The Violet Evergarden special is a wonderful little extension of the show, exploring a job that is important in Violet’s long list of works and for showing how far she’s grown, and the spinoff movie is a super sweet look at what would happen if you took Violet Evergarden and added a sprinkle of slow-burn homoeroticism. But the official movie, that’s something else entirely, and the official movie is the main topic of this post, because I have a lot of thoughts about the movie. 

The show is very episodic in nature. There are some overarching threads, most notably Violet’s development as a character, but each adventure she goes on is pretty much contained to its own episode, and each episode has its own moral. And that episodic nature mixed with an overarching character development is one of the reasons the show works so well, because while each story and commission that Violet gets is different, and each person that Violet works with is their own person and tell their own stories, Violet is the same person, learning how to be like the emotional, warm, and just indisputably human characters that she comes across. Each episode, after meeting a new person, she learns something new about what feelings are and what they mean, but the way she processes that information is extremely unique, as she processes it through her trauma, and always ties what she learns back to Gilbert. And the reason she can do this, and the reason the show can do this so well, is because Violet refuses to believe that Gilbert is dead. 

This is easily one of my favorite things that the show in its original thirteen episode run does; the show keeps the question of “is Gilbert really dead?” completely vague and without concrete answers, but it keeps bringing it up. Violet asks time and time again “is he alive?” and the audience questions their answer to that question every single time she does. And it can do this because it sets up Gilbert’s death in a way that allows both Violet and the viewer to feel uncomfortable with making the assumption one way or the other. At the end of the war, Gilbert’s body was not found, nor were his ID tags, but Gilbert is established as this person that wouldn’t leave the people he loved behind, and the army is pretty confident in considering him dead, even though they never found his body. So the show presents you with two ways of going about Gilbert’s death: the route his family takes, accepting his death, and the route Violet takes, refusing that he died, and holding out hope that he really is still out there, and the show asks you, as the viewer, to pick which you believe is the case. This is asked of the viewer because the very last scene of the show shows Violet getting one more commission from somebody living in a little cottage on the coast, but away from the city of Leiden, and after she does her whole introduction spiel, but before she actually states her name, she looks up at the person behind the door (who we do not see) and pauses, before saying her name with an uncharacteristic shake in her voice. This, combined with the fact that this commission is apparently “urgent” makes for two interpretations: either this is a commission for somebody who Violet is happy to see, maybe somebody sick but still joyful, or somebody she has seen before, or somebody beautiful, but unrelated to her distant past, or it’s somebody she has wished to be alive all along: Gilbert. This open-ended final scene is a perfect ending for this show, because it asks the viewer what they believe, and it’s a result of how they react when it comes to Violet’s journey. 

I thought that the series would forever sit on this ending, because everything that was released after this, the OVA episode fourteen, and the spinoff movie, never mentioned where they sat in the timeline, because there is an arguably indistinct amount of time between the resolution of the conflict in episode thirteen and that final scene which both the OVA and the spinoff could take place, but with the official movie, that is not the case. It cannot be the case. Violet Evergarden: The Movie must come last, and that causes a problem: it removes literally any and all emotional impact of the last scene of the show. 

Violet Evergarden: The Movie is part recap movie, part ending to Violet’s story. In it, Violet, and the rest of the CH Postal company, find out that Gilbert is alive. 

Yeah.

You know the whole thing that made the show so effective? The thing that Violet struggled with over 13 episodes, only to accept at the very end the thing she didn’t want to accept? Yeah, that thing? The movie decided to just erase all of that and tell the audience “eh, whatever your headcanon was, it doesn’t matter, because he is alive, deal with it.”

And that made me mad when I saw the trailers for the movie. I wanted the show to forever stay ambiguous on the matter, because that made the work more meaningful and beautiful as a whole. I didn’t need to know that Gilbert was alive or dead, because by the end of the show, I had finally accepted that he probably was dead, and that there was no bringing him back, just like Violet had. This made me so mad that I actively refused to watch the show for two years, until reluctantly I decided to give it an honest-to-god shot during a nine hour plane ride, and coming out of the movie, I am glad I watched it. It was a phenomenal movie. It was honestly the best animation I’ve ever seen. Eye candy from start to finish, as is a standard for this franchise, but the movie did it better than usual. The story was great too, and the emotional moments almost made me cry, which is saying a lot because “almost crying” for me is the same as “rolling on the floor incomprehensibly babbling through sobs heavier than an anvil” for others. Violet trying so hard to say anything to Gilbert at the very end, but only managing to say “Major,” over and over again through her sobs was so good, and I think the only reason I didn’t actually cry was because I was on a plane and I was holding myself back. There were moments like that aplenty, and it was amazing to watch in the moment, but after that, I got to thinking about how I really felt about the movie, and it just felt so strange to think that Gilbert was alive and well, and that Violet just quit her job and lived on some random ass island for the rest of her life, when in the show she was shown to have made a name and a life for herself that she had become happy with. 

And therein lies the problem I have with this movie: it conflicts so heavily with what the show had to say. The movie, by itself, in a vacuum, is absolutely wonderful, but when you take the things that the movie does, and compare it to the show, which you have to do because the movie is a dependent extension of the show, the movie stands at odds with the thing it’s supposed to be the final chapter to, which makes it kind of not good at closing out the franchise. Because of that, my brain has to do these mental gymnastics to try and rationalize why the movie isn’t a part of the series cannon and is it’s own thing, and I think that’s what I have just had to accept. The movie is just kind of its own thing, and I think it helps that it feels like its own thing. The movie is both its own original story, as well as a recap movie of sorts, a la Evangelion and Madoka Magica’s two recap movies, but this time around, instead of recapping the movie beat by beat, it recaps it in a way that reconstructs the show to fit what the movie wanted to do. The only scenes in the movie that are ripped from the show directly are the scenes from the war itself, from when Violet was younger, and still a weapon of war. Everything else is reframed as history, as the retelling of the legendary doll Violet Evergarden, the person who wrote a love letter for a princess, the person who wrote a song for an opera singer, the person who wrote a play for a famous playwright. 

I think my brain has kind of settled on the VE Movie being in this nebulous space between cannon and fan fiction, where it doesn’t feel like it’s so derivative and outlandish to be considered fanfiction, and still definitely being canon, but still not being so in line with the canon established by the show that I’d be happy considering it canon. So it’s not canon in my mind, but it’s also not non-canon, if that makes any sense. 

Violet Evergarden: The Movie is a wonderful piece of art, a movie that I think more people should watch, and one of my favorite movies of all time now, but I still and will probably forever have a complicated relationship with it purely because it is that good, and because it tackles the only thing that was really left in the franchise to tackle. It is a phenomenal ending to the series, but I still will forever be salty about the way it closed things out. I will say, however, that I’m glad that the movie did not tie off every loose ribbon, and left some room for the audience to interpret. My personal favorite was the fact that they did not do fan service, and show an old Violet, or an old Gilbert, or whatever. All they did was imply that Violet moved to the island that Gilbert had run off to, and that she lived a long and happy life away from CH postal on that island. It’s not quite the open-ended bookend that was the last scene of the thirteen episode run that I had loved so much, but it was a neat touch onto an already wonderful movie. 

#anime #violet evergarden #violet evergarden: the movie

[tomorrowandstilltomorrow]

The Joyce Novel With A Long Name

A few years back, when I was a sophomore in High School, I decided that it was going to be a wonderful idea to try and read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Shortly thereafter, I stopped reading it because James Joyce and a kid that barely understands the traumatic aspects of organized religion do not go together well. I was also at a point in my life where I was still figuring out what I liked to read, and while A Portrait fits into that category quite well, it was a little bit too much to start with, and I didn’t have the background that I have now. I only read about 100 pages, and then shelved the book.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I went home from college for an engagement party, where I looked at my bookshelf and saw the novel sitting on my bookshelf. I was curious and decided to open it up again, and as I read a few pages, I thought that this was definitely something that I could read all the way through. I wanted to actually finish something that I started and didn’t complete, which is something I rarely do. There are plenty of books on my shelf that I started but did not finish, and I thought that maybe I can give Joyce one more try to see if I like it. The main reason I wanted to complete this book over the other ones that are half finished on my shelf is because, one of these days, I want to read Ulysses, and I feel like if I can do this book, then I at least stand a small chance against the beast that is Ulysses. So I read it, and a week and a bit later, I finished it. 

For those unaware, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I will refer to as A Portrait from here on, is a book that follows the life of Stephen Daedalus, a young Irish man as he grows up and goes to school, struggles with family, religion, and his nature as an artist. It’s a thinly veiled autobiographical retelling of Joyce’s life, as Stephen’s life is all but an identical copy of Joyce’s early years. The book starts off with Stephen’s last days with his family before being sent to a boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. From there, Stephen moves around Ireland, going to different schools, experiencing different things and struggles, until he ends up pretty much grown up and decides what he wants to do with his life going forward.  

There are a few things that I took away from this book. There’s a lot going on, but I think there are chiefly two ideas that I came away with. The first one I want to talk about is one that’s kind of a meta-discussion, which this book is a perfect example of, and that idea is that a good novelist has to be a good essayist. This is an idea that a lot of people don’t realize, including myself for the longest time. Until I started actually reading in earnest, I was under the opinion that an essay is a completely different thing from a novel, a short story, or even a non-fiction book. I just saw them as different artforms, almost. It wasn’t until I started reading works like this where I realized that novels are almost derivative of the essay form. I’m not going to go so far as to say that a novel is a form of essay, but good novels definitely use aspects of what makes a good essay, and in order to effectively do that you have to be an effective essayist. 

I think A Portrait, while not entirely an essay from cover to cover, (it does a little more than that) is largely there as a mouthpiece for an essay that Joyce wanted to write that covers the idea of beauty, aesthetics, art, and what being an artist even means. This is most obvious in chapter five, which is littered with Stephen expositing his views (which are just Joyce’s views) on art and the like. However, what sets this book apart from an essay, and what probably lead Joyce to write this book instead of just an essay on the topic, is the fact that Stephen’s views are highly opinionated, and part of what Joyce wanted to do was to demonstrate where Stephen’s views on the topic may have originated from, and to show the origins of an artist. 

This is the biggest advantage that novels have over essays; they can do much more because they have the ability to use things like metaphor, allegory, and characters to demonstrate much more complex and emotional points. Instead of approaching these aspects of human life with cold and analytical language (like every philosophy book ever) novelists instead are able to approach these extremely colorful aspects of human life with equally colorful and evocative language, and can communicate these ideas through shared human experience, instead of trying to explain them in an essay. 

And this ability, for novels to much more effectively attack human experience than the essay, is something that Joyce takes advantage of, for both the discussion of art, as well as something else that Joyce tackles in this book, which is the theme at the center of the book: intense, visceral religious trauma. 

This is the main reason why I was turned off of this book the first time, because I did not understand the religious aspects of this book. The first problem came from the fact that I am not religious, but on top of that, I was not entirely aware of the aspects of religious trauma, why Catholicism is such a big deal in Ireland, and so on. Two and a half years later or so, and I have a much better understanding of these things. 

The biggest advantage I had while reading this book was the fact that I have taken the time since my first attempt at this book to connect myself with my Irish heritage. My family is from Northern Ireland, and because of that I did a lot of research on The Troubles, and ended up reading a phenomenal book called Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Mystery in Northern Ireland. The Troubles are a series of irregular conflicts that are extremely complicated and touchy, however, the conflict mostly stems from the clashing between the Catholic and Protestant churches that originates in England’s occupation and colonization of the territory. 

The second time I went into A Portrait, I actually fully understood how intensely Catholic the country was at the time (and somewhat still is to my knowledge), and was prepared much better for a story about religious trauma. Every chapter in this book is related pretty much to something religious, and every has something happen to Stephen that causes him to question his previously established belief structure, and in every chapter Stephen has a completely different attitude towards the church and his religion. 

In the first chapter, where Stephen is preparing to go to Clongowes, he is a good Christian boy because that’s what his parents have told him to be, and he goes to a school where he promptly gets thrown into a cesspit by a bully. This causes Stephen to get intensely sick and starts having fever dreams, through which Stephen believes that he is going to stay alive because of God, which strengthens his belief. But when he goes home for dinner, he is witness to a political debate over dinner, which leaves him unsure of who he can place his belief and faith in. 

Later, Stephen gets tied in with prostitutes after he had to move out of Colgowes and go to another boarding school, and he becomes overwhelmed by the fear that that causes, and when he confesses, he becomes an unfeeling, unsinning husk to try and make up for his sins. This behavior is noticed by the school, and they come to him with an offer to become a priest. This pretty much enforces the idea that the school wants Stephen to be an unfeeling, black and white zombie, which is completely contrast to who he truly is (or will become): an artist. A being of pure emotion, who thrives on the ability to feel and just be human. 

I’m skipping over quite a few examples but you probably understand what I’m getting at here: Stephen endures a plethora of events throughout his life that constantly play tug-of-war with his belief structure, and by the time that game is done, the rope is completely ripped in half, which is to say that Stephen came out of it, just extremely damaged and traumatized and a shadow of his former self. And, quite honestly, I think Joyce told a story about that, about growing up in an extremely abusive, fear-mongering, religious environment causing lifelong trauma, better than most other people could, partly because he’s James Joyce, and partly because he lived it himself. It’s why the novel is titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; the book is a self portrait of James Joyce, the artist who wrote the book, as a young man, growing up, coming to terms with the world around him, and deciding what to do with his life. 

What this book does is pretty cool, but I’m not going to say I loved the book. It’s just not my cup of tea. I don’t know what it is in particular, but there’s something about how the book is written that just didn’t hook me as much as some of the other books that I read did. I will say that the writing style did keep me invested; Joyce is, surprise surprise, a really good writer, and the book is beautifully written, but there’s just something about the weird half-way stream of consciousness narration style that I didn’t entirely enjoy. But I still had a good and very valuable time with the book, and I think if Ulysses leans more into the style and wordplay as I’ve heard, then I think I really think I’m going to enjoy that book whenever I get around to reading it. 

#books #book review #james joyce

[tomorrowandstilltomorrow]

Hello!

Welcome to Tomorrow and Still Tomorrow! I’m Whale, and I exist elsewhere on the internet where I talk mostly about Genshin Impact, but I have a plethora of other interests outside of that, most notably reading, and I don’t have a place really to talk about that, so I made this blog! (Also I’ve wanted to make a tumblr for so long so)

The name of the blog comes from A Fable by William Faulkner, and it’s one of my favorite quotes in general. “Let them believe that tomorrow they will end it: then they wont begin to ponder if perhaps today they can. Tomorrow. And Still tomorrow. And again tomorrow. That’s the hope you will vest them in.” I chose that name mostly because that’s mostly what I made this blog for. I am on a journey to 100% William Faulkner, an American author, and I have had a lot of thoughts about his works that I have read so far and nowhere to put them. So a majority of this blog will be about William Faulkner’s works, as that’s what I mostly read now a days. 

Granted, that won’t be everything. I read other books, believe it or not, as well as just do other things. I have a plethora of hobbies, from video games to music to anime to writing, and I just kind of wanted an outlet for all of it, instead of being pigeon-holed into one specific thing like I am on my YouTube and Twitter. 

So welcome along! If you want to find me elsewhere, I go by WhaleMilk everywhere except here, so it shouldn’t be hard to find me, but if you’re here you probably already know of my other places. 

[tomorrowandstilltomorrow]

A Love Letter To Content Creation

Recently, on my main channel, I released a video after a four month hiatus due to school, and after I released that video, I soon after got a comment that said

“Man you make the best genshin related content. please never quit”

And like that’s definitely not true; there are some amazing content creators in the lore circle, and even better content creators outside of that small circle, but that doesn’t change the fact that this comment, and ones similar, are the prime examples of why I make content. It’s not because people look up to me, it’s not because it makes me feel “famous,” it’s because, the fact that somebody thought to write a comment like that, something so positive and encouraging, means that they enjoyed the thing that I made. I made somebody’s day just a little bit better. And that means everything to me. 

I have been making content online for the majority of my life. I remember recording Minecraft Lets Plays when I was in the fourth grade. Granted, they never actually made it online, but they were recorded with the express intention of ending up there. And I remember recording those not because I wanted to be famous like my favorite Let’s Players, I recorded those because I wanted to make others feel the same joy and wonder and warm comfort that my favorite Let’s Players made me feel. 

I remember making little dumb improv-skits with my friends in the basement of one of their houses. We recorded these little skits on my old iPod touch. Obviously they were dumb and filled with the humour of elementary schoolers, but we still made them because they were so endlessly entertaining for us, especially when we captured something that got us keeling over in laughter for minutes on end. And it was the idea of spreading this laughter, making somebody chortle, or even making somebody smirk imperceptibly, made me want to make and record even more, dumber skits with my friends. 

I remember, when I was in fifth grade, trying to start a channel that is lost to the currents of the internet where I uploaded a video welcoming hypothetical viewers to my channel. My parents found out quickly, because I didn’t realize YouTube emailed you when a video successfully went up. They, rationally, did not like that their very young child was uploading his own face to the internet, and told me to take it down. I cried because I “wanted to make people smile.” I took the video down. 

I remember figuring out how to edit in Windows Movie Maker. I cut together a crude minecraft let’s play over the course of a few hours. It wasn’t good, but I learned that I enjoyed editing. There was something cathartic and relaxing about sifting through footage and cutting together the interesting parts. I learned that making a video is almost like writing a book, where you have to properly pace the video to where your viewer won’t get bored, and you can’t just show the viewer what’s happening. You have to do more to the video, just like in writing you have to do more to the prose to make it good. Those things I couldn’t do with Windows Movie Maker, so I observed the things you could do with good editing software from the content creators I watched at the time, and internalized it. 

I remember when I was first getting into watching people livestream, and I thought to myself that I could do the same thing. I tried to download streaming software onto my computer that could barely play most of the games that I was into at the time, much less process and encode video at the same time, and attempted to stream. It didn’t work out, obviously, and that made me very sad. I wanted to play games with people, and my computer didn’t enjoy that. So I told myself that in the future I would stream once I had a computer that was powerful enough. 

And when I finally was old enough for my parents to be okay with me putting content on the internet, when I had access to slightly better video editing software, when I finally bought a computer that was able to record and livestream games, I felt so free. I was finally able to do what I wanted. So I got to recording and streaming right away. I learned how to use OBS, I learned Davinci Resolve, I learned how to use Twitch, and I was always looking to play games with friends so I could record or stream, and when we were done playing, I practiced editing my vods down in a way that was funny or highlighted the stuff that we did. 

And so I did that for a while. Played stupid games with my friends, did stupid things, sometimes recorded it, and edited the vods down. My goal was to emulate people like SovietWomble, trying to use subtitles for comedic effect. I got okay at it, it was just the fact that pacing the videos wasn’t really my strong suit. And I had fun. A lot of fun. 

Then Covid hit. Lockdown was hard on all of us, and while I had practically no work to do in any of my classes, I decided that I wanted to make some more videos. The first idea I came up with was to do a game review of a random free game I got on steam, called Deiland. Really, that video is what started it all for me and the content that I make now, but it was kind of my soft start, because that video was still bad, my voiceover was uncomfortable and quiet with little expression, and the visuals were nonexistent. I wasn’t really passionate about that video. So I kept throwing things at the wall, waiting for something to stick. 

That’s where I made my longest scripted video to date, BDG Unraveled, where I went through every BDG video in sequence because he’s a creator I look up to, and I love his work, and I saw a few tentative connections throughout his work that I thought would make an interesting video. So I did, and it’s then that I really figured out my style of scripting and narration. Shortly after that I did another video about critical role, and then I started playing a weird little game called Genshin Impact. 

And from here the story is quite simple. I made a dumb video presenting a theory I thought had a little bit of ground, but not a whole lot, and then put it together and threw it out there. I made this video because I had always wanted to get into a game that had that certain style of storytelling that’s perfect for theories. Slowly drip-feeding you information to where you slowly build up an understanding of the world of the story, while also being engineered to constantly leave you with question after question for more and more theories. I grew up watching Game Theory and the Five Nights at Freddy's theories (pretty much where that style of storytelling got its most substantial level of awareness) and so I’ve always wanted to involve myself in a community that had a story like that. When I started playing Genshin, I soon started to learn that’s what this game had, and I also learned that I was very early in. At the time, really the only person that I knew that was doing any sort of lore on the game was Teyvat Historia. It was an untapped market. So I made the video, and it was successful. 

I found a game I loved with a story that I loved where I could make content in a form that I loved. It was the perfect combination at the perfect time. And now I’m at a point where I have been making genshin content for two years now. I have done seventy-five Sunday streams, where I get to hang out with my viewers, and I get to see the thing I have always dreamed of doing: making people’s day. Entertaining people. Making people’s lives that much better and more comfortable. I have gotten to make some amazing videos, I have gotten to go crazy over a game that has had twist after twist in its story. I have gotten to make some amazing friends in the form of the people that make the same content as I, as well as the people that chill in my streams and watch regularly. 

But I think content creation has had a much bigger impact on my life, beyond what I just listed, and that’s really why I wrote this letter. Content creation has become a constant in my life. It has become something I can always turn to when I am bored, or struggling with something in life, or when I want to feel accomplished in something. It’s something that I can always do. It’s something that will never go away. Whenever I upload a video, or press “go live,” I know that somebody will see it, or somebody will tune in, and I can entertain, even if it’s one person. And that alone makes my day, and it makes me feel better. 

And because of that positive feedback loop, content creation has helped me become much more confident in myself. I am much more verbose, articulate in my points, confident with myself both online and in real life, whereas before I was shy both to introduce myself to real people, or to start talking in online communities and insert myself into one. I have become a much better leader, writer, organizer, and I can carry a conversation because that’s what streaming is at its core. It’s one person carrying a one-sided conversation, which requires a very strong stream of consciousness, and streaming has helped me develop that stream of consciousness. It’s a skill a lot of people don’t have. 

That’s really why I wanted to write this letter–because two years later, I have become a better person just because I decided to make videos about a funny game, and because people decided to watch me talk about a funny game. It has changed my life. 

Thank you guys for two years of Genshin Content :) 

#genshin