17. Semantics / Conceptual Metaphors / Finals / Slashes

(My #16 was accidentally on draft mode and not published.)


Have there really been 17 weeks? I know I've been early sometimes and late other times. I tried to write one of these for each week, I may have ended up doubling some weeks... I have no idea.

I don't like being basic. I find it contradictory to art since I think art is about shooting past what you thought was your potential. I think that's mostly what I've been repeating time and time again here on this blog.

Taking an extreme left brained class like linguistics with a right brained (at least in my strategies) screenwriting class has caused issues for me. For this semester, I've been able to slide into the right brained side with more ease, but flipping the switch the other way has been fierce. Doing both at the same strength at the same time is overwhelming. I'm currently more in my linguistic mindset after a paper, presentation, and final which I think admittedly I did more mediocre on than usual. Perhaps if I pushed more into linguistics these past four months I would have suffered in screenwriting. It's difficult to balance the two at the same time, at least while writing my initial pilot draft. I would bargain that now that's its a more analytical task of going back through and dotting and crossing my letters, I won't be leaning so much on the right side. I don't think I'm a one-sided brain kind of person. In fact, I think that's what makes me unusual. But trying to think in both for a semester... which I've done at times... is absurd now that I ponder this.

This fall has been the best part of the year for me. I feel like things are transitioning well from here to spring too. It's been a rough road in graduate school. When I first started this journey, I told myself, "I have my wings now, but I need to get them detailed." I'm trying to understand my own feathers.

I do believe in having a large writing portfolio. I've proven to myself I can write across the genres. I think I want to take a bold step. I'd like to make up my own genre. Ha! Yeah, I've lost it...

It's probably going to be more of a sub-genre, or a child genre. I see a lot of opportunity in the Ozarks not being used. So before I do anything gutsy and move to a coast, I think I want to take some chances here to create something wild, organic, touching, beautiful... and my own. Instead of replicating the voices around me, I'd like to go more into something unique that I've found internally in myself. I'm not sure it will be anything new concept wise, but I think it'd be fresh even if it's been seen in some capacity. I want to give myself a chance, and I think sometimes in order to do that you have to go out and create that chance yourself. I have learned that in creativity that one of the reasons I like being behind the scenes is that I can inspire performance and there's something gratifying in that. There's nothing more vulnerable than being the actor, the singer, or the dancer. It's so much more raw in the spotlight.

As with writing, I think it's important to have a thousand ideas in store. A writer should always have so much to write that they feel their life won't be able to grab at all of it. (The pronoun "their" really should be acceptable in singular cases. I'm tried of wanting to use it that way, stopping to think about changing it, and then being distracted by a pronoun.) Writing takes practice. Without a thousand different ideas, it can be difficult to fuel the need to write.

I want authenticity in my writing. I think in order to do that I have to seek out truth for myself. Authenticity is what the soul craves, but I think we're overwhelmed in a world run on superficiality. I think the worst insult to writing would be that it's superficial. I cringe at aspects in writing that ring superficial. Sure, it exists in the real world, but that's everything I want to avoid -- just like being too basic. There's a time when simple math problems are appealing, but I think as you grow and appreciate math -- larger sequences rub your mind in more of a philosophical way. Granted, ones and zeros can offer a lot of information... I can't believe I just went there. Okay. We're not just a bunch of binaries. There's little, in my opinion, that's left to black and white thinking. I find that reasoning underdeveloped, generally speaking.

The more I can think of in spectrum form, the more I find that I understand. I hate micromanagement and placing people into camps of good and bad. There's really a nice amount of blend in figuring out how much something can be given freedom and how much structure. If we're counting but the ridges on checkers, we won't play the game.

This post is a mess. This is why you shouldn't take linguistics and teleplay writing at the same time. There's too many conceptual metaphors, and I'm having way too much fun trying to connect dots here. This is why you should take linguistics and teleplay writing at the same time.

Figurative language doesn't scare me. In fact, put more metaphor into your screenplay. The more wild the metaphor -- the more tantalizing to the audience. We need new visuals to inspire, and to get there is going to take reinventing the metaphors. I want prose that's as lucid as my dreams. I want the reality that's there, because if I'm going to spend roughly 33% of my time dreaming, I would like more to help decode what exactly that neurologic euphoria exactly happens to be.

Semantics is your friend. Maybe men are like syntax and women are like semantics; they both operate together but... I don't think they quite relate. Goodnight everybody!