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The Freedom of Pendleton Ward

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A massive battle known only as the ominous “Mushroom War” has effectively destroyed humanity. Earth’s very crust has been half-shattered as though an asteroid has sheared a quarter of half the planet. Our hero suspects he is the only human remaining in existence.

This is not, we should note, the plot of a sci-fi novel or a summer blockbuster film. Instead it is the premise behind Pendleton Ward’s popular cartoon Adventure Time, which airs on Cartoon Network. The series follows a pair of friends — Jake the (shapeshifting) dog and Finn the human — as they battle boredom, rescue and hang out with an array of eclectic princesses, and explore dungeons and seek adventure glory.

Adventure Time is part science fiction dystopia, part fantasy adventure, part bedtime children’s story, part teen drama, and part bromance comedy. Perhaps the keys to the show’s success — and therefore the most prominent genre — is in the bromance teen dramedy elements: the relationship between the brotherly main characters, Finn and Jake, and the constant tension between Finn and his trio of love interests — a bubblegum princess, a flame princess, and vampire kinda-princess.

But what the casual viewer may miss in the dynamic relationships of the show is the ingenuity of its creator, Pendleton Ward. The universe he built in Adventure Time is at the same time sarcastic and fully invested, childish and heavy, goofy and tragic. Its first episode on Cartoon Network featured a kingdom of candy people. Being attacked by candy people zombies. Its hero has no discernable super powers in a world replete with magic and super-science. The villain is a tragic and endearing loner.

The English Playground

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Last month, poet John Davis Jr. — a fellow student at the University of Tampa — passed along this article entitled “7 bogus grammar ‘errors’ you don’t need to worry about.” The article has tumbled around my thoughts during the intermediary weeks and led me to an important affirmation: We need to know grammar rules, and we need to break grammar rules.

The article addresses a series of classical grammatical rules and employs historical research and practical logic to debunk the necessity of certain rules, such as the split infinitive rule:

1. Don’t split infinitives
The rule against splitting infinitives — that is, putting an adverb between the word to and a verb — was pretty much made up out of whole cloth by early 19-century grammarians, apparently because they felt the proper model for English was Latin, and in Latin, infinitive-splitting is impossible. However, English is not Latin, and infinitives have been profitably split by many great writers, from Hemingway (“But I would come back to where it pleases me to live; to really live”) to Gene Rodenberry (“to boldly go where no man has gone before”). It’s okay to boldly do it.

I have been accused — by friends, enemies, and a wife of mine — for being a certain breed grammar fascist. But the article is compelling. It softens even my own clutching grip on grammatical strictures.

At the heart of language is the desire for accurate communication. We often prefer language to gestures and smoke signals because language has a greater precision and efficiency to it. But the preceding seven archaic and obsolete grammar rules possess either some fixation with Latin or an arbitrary effort for legislated order.

The English language, perhaps more than most languages, is a fluid, livid language, an uncontainable language. It absorbs new terms and grammatical ephemera like an egg whisks into cake batter. And likewise, the writer’s liberties with the language extend to even greater lengths.

Language needs to be a playground for the wordsmith. Writers need to break rules — write incomplete sentences, twist grammar and split infinitives, invent new and clumsy words. But the unfortunate first step in turning the confines of language into a playground: Know the rules.

Salvadore Dali did not start with a painting of a soggy clock; he started by mastering all the preceding forms of paint, then proceeded to invent his own. Writing is the same way. We must learn the rules, then discard the ones we have no use for.

Replacing “Ands” with “Buts” or “Therefores”

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In the short documentary The Making of South Park: 6 Days to Air, writer and co-creator of South Park, Trey Parker, discussed the process with which he weekly fits an overabundance of story and gag into a 22-minute television show. His methodology is pertinent to all forms of storytelling:

I’m pretty scared right now, ’cause I’m up to twenty-eight pages, and I still have one, two, three, four, five scenes still to write and each scene is about a minute long, usually. So this is going to end being about a forty-page script, I think. … [So we need to] start taking scenes that are there and figuring out, okay, how can we make this same thing happen in half the time and rewrite it.

[I call it] the rule of replacing “ands” with either “buts” or “therefores.” And so it’s always like: This happens and then this happens and then this happens. Whenever I can go back in the writing and change that to: This happens, therefore this happens, but this happened; whenever you can replace your “ands” with “buts” or “therefores,” it makes for better writing.

Say what you will about the crass, profane, and eclectic South Park — because I’m about to: It is the best satire since Alexander Pope. And for them to produce the wit, stories, and music they do within a week is a testament to both an amalgamation of creative talent and a grinding, determined editorial drive.

On Wednesday, Perpetual Murray shared a brilliant editing technique from Amina Gautier (see “Kill Those Trees!”). Gatier prints multiple copies of her manuscripts and with each copy edits a specific element of style or craft. Count me among those who will now have a printed copy set aside for the most unpronounceable rule, the Rule of Replacing “Ands” with “Buts” or “Therefores.”

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Kill Those Trees!

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Future paper.

Sorry, but you have to die, tree.

I know, I know. But before you pick up your green placards, please hear me out. To begin with, these are not my words (not that I need to pass the blame), but these words come from Amina Gautier, whose work, especially her short story collection, At Risk, I have come to admire.

Yes, Gautier is very environmentally conscious. At the same time, she recognizes that the same way a painter requires a canvas and a sculptor wood, clay, stone or metal, a writer needs paper. Granted, this is the electronic age and almost every industry is going paper-less, but for a writer, the use of paper is still an indispensable part of the craft.

If you have ever proofread, you will agree that it is so much easier to catch errors on a printed page than it is on the computer screen. Gautier’s recommendation to use paper, however, has to do with craft, perfecting one’s work. In the revision phase, she recommends printing multiple copies of a story and revising each stack for a single element of craft. This means components that work together to bring a story to life, such as character, mood, setting, voice, conflict, dialogue, imagery, scene vs. summary, and so forth, must be compartmentalized. In this way, you give undivided attention to each aspect of craft, revising with specific questions in mind.

Practiced writers know that you cannot underestimate the value revision. Reading Isaac Babel’s story, You Must Know Everything in one of The New Yorker’s fiction podcasts, George Saunders said that what he admires most about Babel is that he can tell that Babel was extremely disciplined, a heavy editor and was hard on himself. This is exactly what Gautier says writers must be if they are to produce memorable stories. She says the same way that models and actors spend money on photo shoots, writers must use up reams and reams of paper in the revision process until that masterpiece comes to life.

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“I Love That You Made Him Gay”

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When I was 20 years old, I wrote a science fiction novella which for all its narrative potential was flawed beyond structural and grammatical repair. I had just started to take writing seriously and made all the common mistakes new writers make: abounding clichés, barely-fleshed scenes, a cringe-worthy voice more amused with itself than the story. Despite these problems which, at the time, I had no idea how to repair, I knew the story had a heart.

The heart belonged to a man whose male friend had been hijacked and murdered in the depths of space and who had lost his parents the same way, in front of his eyes, as a child. And while he seemed on one hand to be a hackneyed, hard-boiled detective zooming around the future as the Everyman Space Opera Anti-Hero, seeking revenge against his friend’s killer, underlying this was something that made him resonate with me.

My protagonist loved his friend. He understood the impermanence of life, and he had found someone who he truly loved more than himself. I knew this as soon as I had finished writing the novella, which ended with the protagonist standing over his friend’s coffin, talking to him as if over mugs of coffee, with a familiarity we are lucky to have even once with someone in our lives.

When I had an acquaintance read over the manuscript, the acquaintance commented that the final scene was the most poignant of the story.

Then the acquaintance said, “I love that you made him gay.”

I was surprised. I didn’t have any opposition to writing gay characters, but that wasn’t the way I had seen the character when writing his story. I had seen the bereaved and the deceased as fraternal childhood friends. I thought, what about the story indicated that the protagonist was gay? As if it was just another error in the narrative that needed fixing.

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