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Why that Shitty Chicken in Moana was Important

2/13/2017

So, Moana's basic message was pretty straightforward, and they didn't try to make it subtle at all; it's about finding validation internally rather than externally. Moana isn't great because the sea chose her, she's great because she has the clarity to see what she needs to to and the resolve to get it done. Maui isn't great because he has a magical fish hook that lets him shapeshift, he becomes great because he's willing to be brave and selfless even at the cost of the one thing that makes him feel special. Moana is about finding the thing that drives you, and becoming the kind of person who does what needs to be done in order to see it through.

So why do I think this shitty, comic-relief chicken is important? Because he represents the value of morality. Bear with me here.

The message of the story isn't one that has much to do with morality, it just has to do with belief in oneself. But, the writers did want to make sure that they did include something about being a good person, and that's where the chicken comes in. His name is Heihei, by the way. I looked it up.

Heihei isn't cute. He isn't smart. In fact, he's so dumb that he doesn't even really know how to eat without assistance - he likes to try to eat rocks, and needs to be pointed in the proper direction of real food. On a dangerous trip like the one he's on with Moana, he's more than just useless - he's a liability. But Moana values all life - that's part of what initially drew the sea to her - and she takes care of Heihei despite his complete lack of any redeeming qualities, and despite the fact that he does occasionally annoy her.

For almost the entirety of the movie, he's completely dead weight. He gets in the way, and honestly, he doesn't even do a great job at being comic relief to the audience. But then, at one crucial moment towards the end of the movie, and only for that one moment, he's useful. His tendency to try to eat rocks drives him to save the Heart of Te Fiti as it's about to be lost underwater while our protagonists are racing away from Te Ka, the lava monster. Heihei's moment of glory is unintentional and over in an instant, and he goes back to being absolutely useless for the rest of the movie immediately afterwards.

But that one moment is important because it shows the importance of not just looking at the most obvious, efficient way of accomplishing your goal, but instead making sure to follow one's moral values in the process. There were many times throughout the movie when Moana could have decided to ditch Heihei and would have ostensibly been better off without him, but she didn't, and in the end, in that one moment, it became her saving grace.

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Introduction to Narrative Themes

8/20/2016

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I've never taken a creative writing course or gone to a writer's workshop, so maybe (probably) this is already an established thing, but I have a writing tool that I call "narrative theme". I first thought of it when I was analyzing the plots of some of the Final Fantasy games. The idea is this: when you write a story, have all of the characters' backgrounds and experiences revolve around the same theme. Examples: love, death, sorrow, war, ambition. Have the protagonists deal with the theme in a healthy way, and the antagonists deal with it in an unhealthy way.

It's a useful tool, because by revolving your story around a narrative theme, you can solve many problems at once. Most obviously, this gives a moral to your story - it makes your story make a point. The way that the protagonists deal with the theme is the way you believe the theme should be dealt with in real life. Having a narrative theme also helps your characters' interpersonal dynamic: by design, your characters will have similar histories and that will give them a way to relate to one another. It will give protagonists a way to build rapport and camaraderie, letting them understand each others' struggles. Similarly, it will make your antagonists' motivations relatable to both the audience and the protagonists, while also playing upon an irreconcilable difference between the way your protagonists and antagonists deal with the theme. The antagonists' improper or unhealthy way of dealing with the theme can also cause the protagonists to consider their own motivations and strengthen their resolve.

I think of using a narrative theme similarly to how I think of the standard five paragraph persuasive essay format that many of us learn in school. It has its drawbacks and may be seen as overly formulaic to the trained eye, but it's also a very good way of learning the fundamentals of the medium. Using a narrative theme doesn't seem quite so amateurish to me as a five paragraph persuasive essay, but I say this as someone who isn't yet accustomed to creative writing.

I may go into more detail on this in future posts, but here are the themes that I noticed in some of the Final Fantasy games:

Final Fantasy VII - Dark pasts
Final Fantasy VIII - Love
Final Fantasy IX - Identity
Final Fantasy X - Death
Final Fantasy XII - Loyalty (not as sure about this one)

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Cool Parallel Between English and Japanese Histories and Languages

5/21/2015

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People that this will interest: linguistics buffs, history buffs, Japanese language students, English language students, writers in general, fans of trivial knowledge. Please note: I've simplified the history a bit, so if you're super interested in this, there's still a lot more to look into that I haven't gone over.

Some of you probably already know that English includes both Germanic and Romance roots - it's why so many words are familiar to us when we study German and the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, etc.). The Germanic elements of English come from the Anglo-Saxons, a group of people who migrated to Great Britain in the 5th century, whose language spread across England and parts of Scotland and Wales. Their language was what we now call Old English, and it's what most people in England spoke until the Normans invaded in 1066 and brought with them their own language, a dialect of Old French.

After the Normans invaded, there were two languages being spoken in England by two different groups of people: Old English was being spoken by the general populace, and Anglo-Norman was being spoken by the new ruling class. The Germanic roots of modern English were spoken by everyday people, and the French roots of modern English were being spoken by kings, judges, politicians, generals, academics, and other aristocrats.

The effect that this had on English is that its Germanic words tend to be the short, simple ones, and the longer, more academic words tend to be the ones that came from French. The amount of Germanic and Norman words that you use in a sentence can completely change the way that you come across, even if the words mean the exact same thing.

For example, take a look at these two sentences:

The best way for people to get what you're saying is to talk like this.
The most optimal method for people to understand the idea that you're trying to convey is to articulate in this fashion.

The first sentence uses more Germanic words, and the second sentence uses more Norman words. Both types of words have their own places in our language, and most of us unconsciously choose which type of word best fits a given situation. You'd be more inclined to use the Germanic words in everyday conversation, and Norman words in academic or formal settings. Using too many Norman words can make you sound like you're trying too hard to sound erudite, and using too few can make you sound like you're uneducated.

Now, what I find really cool about this is that the same sort of dichotomy exists in Japanese.

The Japanese language wasn't influenced by invaders like English was - Japan has never been successfully invaded. Nevertheless, just like in England, the aristocracy of Japan was influenced by another language - in their case, Chinese. In its early years, the Japanese language didn't have a written form. When royal courts first began to realize the value of writing down information, they employed bilingual officials from China (or Korea) to write down information in their native language.

Literacy in Chinese writing became a valuable skill for the Japanese aristocracy, and could lead to social advancement. At first, texts were written and read only in Chinese, but the Japanese eventually created a system which involved adding small marks to the Chinese texts to allow them to be read in Japanese. The Japanese also adapted a phonetic version of the Chinese characters, so that they could have a way of spelling out Japanese words by sound.

This eventually resulted in the current Japanese writing system, which has three separate alphabets. The first is kanji, which are the original Chinese ideograms, representing ideas instead of sounds. The other two, hiragana and katakana, are phonetic and used to represent sounds. Hiragana is used for Japanese words, and katakana is used for foreign words.

Chinese didn't just affect the Japanese writing system - it also affected vocabulary. As a result of the early use of Chinese in Japanese imperial courts, there are many words in modern Japanese that come from Chinese. And, since the words were originally used by court officials, emperors, and other aristocrats, they are the words that sound more educated and refined, but can also make you sound grandiloquent when overused, just like words with Norman roots in English.

So, to recap: in both English and Japanese, a foreign language was used almost exclusively by the upper class, resulting in two sets of words: everyday, simple words from the original, native language, and scholarly, sometimes pretentious words from the imported language.

The main article is over, but feel free to read on if you're interested in some advice aimed at native English speakers who are studying Japanese as a second language. For more information about the potential effects of Norman language on your writing style, check out this article, which is where I originally found out about the English side of this phenomenon.

One of the neat side-effects of this is that there are often very good equivalents between English and Japanese words. Ordinarily, it would be hard to explain the difference between the words go and travel, but the same difference exists in Japanese (行く [iku] and 旅行する[ryokousuru], respectively). You'll usually find a word with the same nuance if you look up its equivalent in a Japanese-English dictionary, but just to make sure, here's a tip for figuring out which Japanese words have Chinese roots: look up the word's kanji. If a word is using the on-yomi (the pronunciation is in katakana), it comes from Chinese, and if the word is using the kun-yomi (the pronunciation is in hiragana), it's originally a Japanese word. As a general rule of thumb, words with more than one kanji tend to be of Chinese origin, though there are certainly exceptions to that rule.

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Thoughts on the first five stories in storyblog

11/19/2014

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Trouble in Cape Town and Hiroshima

I'm pretty happy with the way these two stories turned out, and a little surprised that writing them went as well as it did. I didn't plan to write either of these; I just sort of sat down and started writing and they came out. At the time, I was trying to write more, and I set out to write for at least half an hour every day for 21 days in order to get into the habit of writing. Trouble in Cape Town and Hiroshima were written on the first and second days of that spree, respectively.

I think I like Trouble in Cape Town a little bit more, but I always use Hiroshima as a writing sample instead whenever I need one for a job that I'm applying for, since the emotions of mine that I'm showing are more positive than in Cape Town. I'm far from being an expert on successfully applying for jobs, but I'm pretty sure that you shouldn't submit writing samples in which you call people shitheads.

I think that the ending for Hiroshima is kind of cheesy, but I'm still happy with it. It details a real experience, and in reality there weren't any events that I could use as a denouement other than my thoughts about the experience, even if they were cheesy. I really did flick the peace bell while thinking about the conversation that I had with that old man, but I didn't think of it as a significant event as it was happening.

After writing those two, I tried to think of other experiences that I could make a similar non-fiction story about, and considered writing about a time that I almost drowned, but I never did end up writing about it. I suppose I'll keep that in my pocket for some other day when I feel like writing that kind of post again.

Desiderative Magnetism

I'm torn about the title. On the one hand, it fits perfectly as far as the underlying theme goes, but on the other hand, it sounds too academic for what it is, and I'm not sure if it's best to directly reference the underlying theme at all. But I can't think of a better title, and it would be a shame to waste a phrase as fitting as "desiderative magnetism", so I kept it. It's a shame there aren't any less academic-sounding synonyms for desiderative (or any at all).

Desiderative Magnetism was the first fictional story that I wrote that I was happy with, and it was the first one for which I was able to put myself into the head of a fictional character and get myself to think like him, so it's an important milestone as far as my growth as a writer goes. The writing process started when I started writing from his perspectives, just detailing his thoughts on life, and it was only after I'd written most of his thoughts on how the world works that I decided to make a story about his past, too. I think that you can sort of tell that, if you look carefully, but I'm not sure it's a problem. I used to dislike that about its structure, but now I don't mind. I think the first sentence ("They told me to write what I feel") is a good way of letting you know that this is coming from someone who is in some kind of therapy and also gives insight into why he would want to talk about the way he thinks the world works before he starts going into more personal detail about himself.

When I sent Desiderative Magnetism to my sister to ask her opinion on it and some other writing samples (Sunup and Hiroshima) that I was thinking of sending with a job application, she told me, "It's my general opinion about writing right now that one should either write what one knows - fiction based on personal experience - or write what no one knows (speculative fiction/sci fi/fantasy). I think it's very difficult to write about real experiences that people really do have but that you have not had (e.g. alcoholism/drug abuse/failed marriages)."

I agree with her second sentence, but not with the first. I do think that it's difficult to write about real experiences that I haven't had, but I don't think that that means that I shouldn't write about it. If I want to be a good writer, I need to be able to do that, and I think this was an important first step in that direction. I do think that I was unrealistically melodramatic at parts of the story, though, and that detracted from making it seem as genuine. For example, I had a sentence about lying in an alley with a needle in his arm, and there was a lot more wrong with that section as far as melodrama goes than this, but it would have been much more convincing if he were in a sloppy apartment than an alley. The sloppy apartment would imply a lot of things about how he'd been handling his divorce and bachelorhood, but all the alley is is a cliche about drug users that wouldn't be accurate in his case. Why would he do drugs in an alley instead of at home, unless he didn't have a home. Why doesn't he have a home? It raises a lot of questions that he doesn't answer, so it detracts from the story.

Sunup

This was inspired by a dream that I had. I wrote this kind of spur-of-the-moment, and I think that it turned out well. I like Sunup and think that it's a strong writing sample, but I'm not in love with it. It's a solid story, but I don't find it compelling. I used to have a higher opinion of it, and maybe I will again if I read it again at another point, but that's how I feel about it right now.

I do think that it's a good example of my ability to use consistent imagery throughout a story, and I am proud of that part of it. I'm happy with the raft/island imagery and the way that I tied it in with the tree at the end, as well as the slight implications that he'd already begun to be less connected to the world before he even reached the tree. I think that there are times when everyone feels like that - a little disconnected with the world, like they're slightly outside of reality - and I like the thought that my story might come to mind when someone feels like that and makes them wonder if they'll be spirited away like Trevor was.

Flight

I'm pretty happy with this one. When I first finished Flight, I thought that the voice of the narrator in the first paragraph didn't fit with its voice in the rest of the story and that I'd have to go back and change it. When I went back to it, though, I didn't think that there was as big of a difference in voice as I thought that there was, and decided not to try to change it. When I reread it when I posted it on this blog, I still felt like it didn't need to be changed. I think it could be changed and that the story could be improved by it, but I don't think the slight voice change is really noticeable unless you're looking for it.

One thing that I really like about Flight is that I intentionally changed the sentence structure in order to affect the way that the reader feels while reading it. When Arthur is running towards and off the cliff edge, there's one run-on sentence that keeps adding new worries and concerns that come flooding into Arthur's head as he runs, and I like the way that that pacing goes along with his mental state and increasing heartbeat. Then, when he finally jumps and time slows down in that moment before the drop, the sentences start having periods again, actually slowing down the pace of reading to match Arthur's mental state in his moment of euphoria and relief. It's the first time that I've done something like that, and I think that using sentence structure as a way of accentuating what's happening in the plot something that even a lot of good authors don't think about when they're writing. I remember when I used to read a lot more that whenever something exciting was happening, especially battles, my eyes would start skipping ahead in the sentences out of excitement, and I was always a little frustrated that the descriptions of what was happening in those moments of high adrenaline were paced the same way as the rest of the book.

General Thoughts

It's strange to me to think about the fact that these were all written over a year ago. I haven't written (well, finished) any new stories since then, and that's a little depressing. I remember that at the time, I was frustrated with the fact that I'd only produce maybe one story a month, and that seemed like such a slow pace, but now I think about the fact that I haven't produced anything in a year, and that seems like so much.

I think a big part of that is how in the habit I am of writing, and I'm hoping that keeping up with this website will start to inspire to me write more frequently. I'm a little worried that if I get a job (temporary or permanent) that it'll make me too tired to write regularly, but I'll deal with that hurdle when I get to it, I suppose. In the meantime, I should make sure that I keep up with my writing.

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Archives by Title

12/5/2013

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Cool Parallel Between English and Japanese Histories and Languages
Introduction to Narrative Themes
Thoughts on the First Five Stories in Storyblog
Why that Shitty Chicken in Moana was Important

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Why that Shitty Chicken in Moana was Important

Introduction to Narrative Themes

Cool Parallel Between English and Japanese Histories and Languages

Thoughts on the first five stories in storyblog

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