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Tag: writing

morning computer curtains

Published December 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Reuben Wu.

It was a dialogue as grim as the language of thunder. The jerkings of his arms cut the sky into pieces, and in the cracks there appeared the face of Jehovah swollen with anger and spitting out curses. Without looking, I saw him, the terrible Demiurge, as, resting on darkness as on Sinai, propping his powerful palms on the pelmet of the curtains, he pressed his enormous face against the upper panes of the window…

THE STREET OF CROCODILES, Bruno Schulz

It was my idea that I would walk through the mirror in my own room. The mirror would soften, and I would be in another land. The moment of the mirror’s softening would be perfection. It would be the coalescing of image and sensation into something more and other than either of these two. It would be analogous to learning to fly or practice telekinesis. Having passed through a buoyant vertical curtain, I would find everything to surprise me.

Of Unicorns: On My Little Pony, by Lucy Ives

CONNECTED:

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The Zone Of The Nameable

Published December 6, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Kafka sensed that by then only the minimum number of elements of the surrounding world ought to be named. He plunged the sharpest Ockham’s razor into the substance of the novel. To name the bare minimum, and in its pure literality. And why so? Because the world was turning back into a primeval forest, too fraught with strange noises and apparitions. Everything had too much power. Thus it became necessary to limit oneself to what lay closest at hand, to circumscribe the zone of the nameable. Then all that power, otherwise diffuse, would be channeled there, and whatever was named—an inn, a file, an office, a room—would fill with unprecedented energy.

K, Roberto Calasso (UK) (US+)

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Frost Marks

Published November 27, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Gary Wagner.

Last night, the robust flowers — yellow, orange, red, and violet — succumbed to an overnight frost. In the morning the shriveled flowers hung crestfallen and lifeless. Should we have anticipated this event and turned “modern” in our attitude? Have brought out the technologies: the plastic wrap, the warm covers? Who would encourage it?

Not the transcendentalists, who visited their flowers in visits to open nature, not by maintaining contrived and entrapped closures. Thoreau delighted in venturing to the woods, not in sitting stultified in a captured zoo-like presentation of nature. Emily Dickinson teaches us that the processes of the universe must necessarily take their course, just as nature intended. To militate against them, regret them and curse them, is to deny them and ourselves, of insight into what is true and wise and necessary. The cycle will go on with us or without us, and we are better to choose to be with it.

The Ice Age camp site of Gönnersdorf on the banks of the Rhine has revealed a groundbreaking discovery that sheds new light on early fishing practices. New imaging methods have allowed researchers to see intricate engravings of fish on ancient schist plaquettes, accompanied by grid-like patterns that are interpreted as depictions of fishing nets or traps.
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Power Movies In Writing

Published November 23, 2024 by Warren Ellis

It’s not just that Mezrich has capitalized on Hollywood’s insatiable appetite for IP —  he has perfected the art of selling his stories for the screen. Normally, a writer publishes a book or article, then tries to get Hollywood interested in adapting it. Mezrich does it the other way around. “I write a ten-to-14-page book proposal, we take it out to Hollywood, and I sell the movie rights,” he says. “Then I go to the publishing houses with these ten pages and I sell the book. Then I write the book in three months while the screenwriter is already working on the screenplay.” If Hollywood doesn’t bite? He just won’t write the book, shelving the idea and coming up with another one.

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The 60 Scene Rule

Published November 21, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Most novels have about 60 scenes and three acts (like a screenplay). So, feel free to use this method to outline a screenplay as wellThe acts are a “series of sequences that culminate in a major turning point in a character’s life.” I wrote that down because Bernhardt said it twice.

  • Acts I and III have about 15 scenes each.
  • Act II is the longest, at 30 scenes.
  • Some novels have more scenes, some fewer. Some even have four acts.

Not convinced I agree with that at all, but a tool can only be judged by whether it gets you where you want to go or not, and maybe this will be useful. According to Dilloway, a novel is sixty scenes. It’s interesting.

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Published September 20, 2024 by Warren Ellis

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Society of the Psyop Part 1: UFOs and the Future of Media, Trevor Paglen

Published September 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

This is really, really good.

I first met Richard Doty in 2022. I was anxious. I could feel my unease rising as his silver SUV pulled into the parking lot across from the makeshift film studio where I was working at the University of New Mexico.2 A paunchy man wearing a red polo shirt emerged. I wasn’t afraid of physical violence. Rick Doty wasn’t known for that. I was worried about my own sanity. Doty was known for that.3

Doty conducted elaborate psyop programs for the US Air Force in the 1970s and ’80s. One of his targets, a defense contractor, was so consumed by paranoia after being subjected to Doty’s craft that he was committed to a mental institution. There was also a well-respected journalist who, after enduring one of Doty’s psychological operations, spent the remainder of her career babbling about reptoids, cover-ups, and ancient alien conspiracies. A third target, a former UFO investigator who collaborated with Doty, publicly confessed to participating in a military disinformation campaign and retreated into self-imposed obscurity. We would be spending the next two days together. It turned out that I liked the guy.

I had sought out Doty because I wanted to learn about the particular form of media-making he practiced to such dramatic effect. My intuition was that Doty’s career as a cultural producer could shed some light on what media might be like in an age of recommendation algorithms, personalized news feeds, information bubbles, and generative AI.

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WORKING, Robert A Caro

Published September 11, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Robert A Caro is the author of vast biographies – inhabitations, really – of powerful men in America. Decades of research go into those books. He even slept rough in Texas to try and understand Lyndon Johnson. This book, several thousand pages shorter than his others, is really just a collection of anecdotes on the authoring of those other monoliths. It’s an easy read and thoroughly charming, filled with interesting and fun stories. But I comb these things for hints on the processes of others.

Right at the end, I get this nugget.

I can’t start writing a book until I’ve thought it through and can see it whole in my mind. So before I start writing, I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two, or one—that’s when it comes into view. That process might take weeks. And then I turn those paragraphs into an outline of the whole book. That’s what you see up here on my wall now—twenty-seven typewritten pages. That’s the fifth volume. Then, with the whole book in mind, I go chapter by chapter. I sit down at the typewriter and type an outline of that chapter, let’s say if it’s a long chapter, seven pages—it’s really the chapter in brief, without any of the supporting evidence. Then, each chapter gets a notebook, which I fill with all the materials I want to use—quotations and facts pulled from all of the research I’ve done.

WORKING, Robert A Caro (UK) (US+)

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THE NOVEL OF THE FUTURE, Anais Nin

Published August 27, 2024 by Warren Ellis

The mood I fall into when I am truly possessed by my work is one which resembles the trances of the mystics. I shut out the outer world to concentrate on what I see and feel. There is no doubt that the act of creation is very similar to the act of dreaming.

Written in 1968, so it’s as old as I am. While framed as a call to arms for a certain kind of novel, it’s largely an exegesis of her own method and her own creative goals and wishes.

I am curious about science, the world around us, fashions, textures, lighting, theater, all the other arts and their particular language. This work is for me, like the scales of the musician.

For me, this was, to use the parlance, to be seen. I was kind of shocked at how much of a process I share, perhaps now more than ever, with a writer who produced these words my own lifetime ago. Perhaps interesting, this was written after the flush of the French Nouveau Roman, with perspective on Robbe-Grillet et al and what needed to come next.

As a writer, I found it completely inspiring to see her process and thinking laid bare. It is an invitation to take her positions and see how it compares with your own. My Kindle highlights are several feet long, I think, and I’ve printed them off to stick in a notebook so I can reflect on them at length. There’s a whole world of ideas, questions and sparks in this sim volume. I think any creative person could get joy and wonder out of it.

I think we should always write about what we know, or what we wish to know.

I believe that to be correct. The latter part is perhaps more important than the first part. This was one of the best books I read this year.

THE NOVEL OF THE FUTURE (UK) (US+)

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Dramatising The World: Toronto, 2005

Published July 11, 2024 by Warren Ellis

This is the text of a talk I gave at the Hacienda bar in Toronto on 28 April 2005. I wandered off-script and expounded/freestyled/rambled more than once — to say the fucking least — so this should probably be seen more as the original blueprint for the thing.

The literary critic Harold Bloom once said that we weren’t fully human until Shakespeare began writing: that Shakespeare completed our sapience. Which is both interesting and stark, utter bullshit. Stories are what make us human. They’re an advanced form of play. Cats have play. Sometimes very sophisticated, dramatised forms of play. But they’re not communicated or externalised. So far, only humans use stories to dramatise the way they see the world.

And we’ve always had them.

Go out to the ancient standing stones at Callanish in the Orkney Islands, at sunrise. You stand in the middle of the stone circle and turn to follow the sun. From that position, the sun is alternately occluded and revealed by the curves of the surrounding hills. The sunrise is dramatised as a struggle. As a performance. Shadows fall and twist around you like spokes, until the sun claws free of the hillside and sends light right down the middle of the circle and on to your face.

Continue readingDramatising The World: Toronto, 2005
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