In the twenty-second episode of the sixth season of Voyager, B’Elanna influences a playwright after crashing on his planet. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
Every once in a while, something I’m reading or watching hits me at precisely the right time. That sort of coincidence or convergence of themes is relatively rare, except perhaps in the case of a number of Discworld novels like Jingo or The Fifth Elephant, which demonstrate that history can be quite repetitive. At the start of the video for this episode, I mentioned that I had just completed the second draft of the outline for my second novel, entirely unaware that “Muse” was about the complications of the creative process. Thus, as I watched this episode unfold, I began to realize how much relevance this episode had to my own life, and there’s no way the showrunners or the writers could have ever planned that. (And if they did… well, we’d need to have a conversation, because that is just eerie.)
This is a fun episode, one that reminded me of “The Ember Island Players” from Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s a meta-examination of the general Voyager story, filtered through the lens of a pseudo-Greek society. (I assume that’s what the writers were referencing here, but correct me if I’m wrong.) I don’t want to ignore this stuff or the cleverness of the script, which contains many of the very techniques that Kelis makes reference to. But part of why I enjoy doing Mark Watches is that I’ve found a way to do critical analysis while remaining very personal, and this episode felt very personal. Look, I’ve spent the better part of the last decade being a reviewer and a critic. Even before I started “Mark Reads Twilight” back in August of 2009 (OH MY GOD, WE ARE SO CLOSE TO THE 8-YEAR ANNIVERSARY), I’d been reviewing albums. Movies. Television shows! If you followed me back on Buzznet, you might remember when I was running the Movies section. (Beg me at a con or event to tell you the story of one of the only times I met a celebrity because of this and actually got starstruck.) I ran a weekly review/theorizing series while LOST was airing in real-time. I used to tour with bands and write non-fiction chronicles of life on the road.
Why do I mention all this? Because up until a few years ago, nearly all of my work was in reaction to someone else’s. While I’m very much happy with that – it’s basically been like a giant Masterclass in dramatic writing – there’s still been a quiet part of me that felt like it didn’t count. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but so many different things kept me away from creative writing. I did some of it growing up and tried my hand at being an English major in college for a semester before I quit that in frustration. I still did non-fiction, but even then, there’s a multi-year gap – from about 2003 – 2007 – where I just stopped writing. So many things stopped it. Life disasters. A bout of homelessness. Bouncing from one minimum wage job to another. I tried my hand at fiction in the late 2000s, but I hadn’t figured out that I needed tons of organization in order to pull off a story or a novel. I always came up with a rough idea, started writing, and then realized halfway through that my story was a terrible mess of tropes and nightmares, so I would abandon it. Over and over again. I was inspired, but there was no follow-through.
It wasn’t until late 2012 that inspiration came, and I finally committed to it. You’ll learn more about the impetus for my first novel very soon, but the single moment that inspired it came from Mark Watches! At that point, however, I’d been studying plot, tone, diction, style, voice, and other such things through this project for years. I had met many writers. I’d listened to them speak about their craft at conventions. So I took all this information I’d gleaned through the years, and I began to apply it to my own work. I initially used the Snowflake method for the plot of the book and the character studies (something that I didn’t repeat for Book #2) because I desperately needed the structure. From there, I realized what I needed to research, did that over a long period in 2013, then assembled a chapter-by-chapter outline.
The act of writing and creation is often not a very pretty process. Like we see in “Muse,” it involves a lot of doubt. Are the things I am creating believable? Will the audience accept them, or will this piss them off? And is that a good or a bad thing? I don’t concern myself so much with trying to control how a person reacts to anything because that’s absurd. Instead, I try to think about an emotion I’m trying to invoke. Is it just for the sake of drama, or is it tied to a greater story? Am I relying on clever tricks, like the elder poet claims of Kelis in this episode? Or are the tricks in service of something greater?
Those decisions have been a constant thing for me the past five years. Five, y’all! Kelis has a much shorter timespan here, and I can definitely speak to the value of short deadlines in the creative process. For some people, that desperation fuels their process. It took me from late 2012 until 2015 to complete my manuscript, at least to the point where I was comfortable letting another person read it. Three years seems like a long time, but I was also running ALL OF THIS concurrently, and I prioritized it most of the time. It paid the bills and kept me barely afloat! Kelis did not have that luxury or that option: his play was an urgent thing, and that came across in what he created. He was consumed with audience reaction first, not the truth of the story. So what happens when he realizes what the “truth” can provide him?
Well, there’s a lot of kissing prior to that WHICH IS NOT A BAD THING, I WOULD BE VERY HAPPY WITH CHAKOTAY AND JANEWAY KISSING. But the “truth” that Kelis finds reaches his Patron in a way that he hadn’t before. The man was entertained, sure, but “Muse” really is about the power of fiction to reach deep inside of people and twist them up, to get them to see the world differently, to affect others in ways that are unique to the art form. At first, B’Elanna sees Kelis and his work as ridiculous and odd, but she comes to appreciate what he does. (And I’m glad we end at that point because the opening was so DISTURBING. I thought we were going to get a super uncomfortable story about B’Elanna being held captive while this man stole her story.) She comes to see why his work is so important!
Like I said at the start, that’s a pretty cool thing to watch at this point in my life. I started plotting out a second novel at the end of January, and I’m very pleased that I’ve gotten as far as I have in just two and a half months. I learned things the hard way the first time around, but as much stress and doubt comes with writing, there’s also a ton of joy. I wrote a book, y’all, and I get to do it again, and there are few things in the world that have ever felt that magical to me.
Except having the people of this planet validate my shipping of Chakotay and Janeway. That was pretty special.
The video for “Muse” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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