Dara Isom was/is a good friend from my Fall 2015 Creative Fiction Writing course. In January 2019, she asked if I would be willing to help her with "a research essay on a topic that has personal significance to me". She chose high-functioning autism / Asperger's and communication. I helped her out by granting permission to use my blog as a source and giving her this interview via email (giving her much better answers than if we had done it in person). Because she was a good friend and I trusted her wisdom and discretion to omit anything that made me look horrible, I was very candid. But she ended up not being able to use it because Dr. Sinor apparently changed her mind about what she wanted to see in the essay, and that was really annoying but I guess it's just life.
C. Randall Nicholson Interview by Dara Isom
Dara: Feel free to talk about whatever you want and feel is important. Feel free to go on random tangents. The more information I get the better. :) You can take your time if you want. I just need it sometime next week.
1. What are your thoughts and feelings about writing and stories in general?
Writing isn't something most people can do well, but in theory, it provides unparalleled opportunities to create things. Most people will never be able to create a blockbuster movie with cutting-edge special effects, but almost anyone with access to writing materials and sufficient training and practice could write the book version that creates a movie in people's minds. Every art form is different and I'm not the type to proclaim that written stories are inherently superior to movies, but that is one advantage they offer. With the rise of computes and the internet, people have more opportunities to share their writing than ever before. I publish on my blog every week for free (I pay for the Premium version of my website, but the blog feature is free) and sometimes I marvel that I have such an opportunity at such a young age. If I had been born twenty, even ten years ago, I wouldn't have. But then I look at my youngest sister who was practically born with a computer at her fingertips and can draw better with a mouse than I can with a pencil, so whatever. I still sometimes get lazy and wish I could just beam my sentences straight from my head onto the page, and I'm sure my grandchildren, in the unlikely event that I ever get married and adopt children, will have the technology to do that. I'll have more to say about my own experience with writing after the next question.
In my opinion most good fiction stories, whether told orally or in books or movies or games or whatever, provide an escape from our crappy lives. An extreme example I read about recently was a group of Jewish girls in a concentration camp who smuggled in a copy of “Gone With the Wind” and risked their lives to read it together every evening. For a few moments every evening, they got to be somewhere that wasn't a concentration camp, and that was worth their lives to them. Most of us will never have to suffer as they did (knock on wood) but no matter how privileged we are, we all have plenty of suffering that we'd just as soon get away from regardless. Life is suffering. Escapism works if it's a "happy" story where we get to experience the satisfaction of justice and good prevailing that so seldom comes along in real life, but it also works if it's a "sad" or even "scary" story where we get to experience a cathartic release of negative emotions, which are healthy and necessary, without any real stakes or losses. It's okay, even great for fiction stories to have parallels to real life and commentary on real issues, but that usually needs to be subtle and cautious or it just comes across to me as preachy and annoying. I'm very aware of how terrible the world is and don't need to be reminded of that when I'm trying to be entertained.
Escapism doesn't mean a work has to be shallow or mind-numbing. The original Star Wars is neither, but it skyrocketed to astronomical popularity in part because people were tired of watching cynical, gritty movies that reflected the cynical, gritty seventies. Why watch a movie to stay right where you are when you could travel a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away? The sequel, spoiler alert, is much quieter, much bleaker. The good guys lose everything. Their base is destroyed, most of the nameless characters who don't have script immunity are killed, and the protagonists lose everything and face the prospect of starting from scratch. And yet it's widely considered to be the best Star Wars film of all time, because of these bold edgy choices but because it still works as escapism. It's still an adventure set in space. The evil might prevail for a time, but that means nothing to our real lives. We can be emotionally invested and experience those feelings without being too emotionally invested because the heroes' losses cost us nothing. The only stakes are the ones set in place for the conclusion of the trilogy. And it ends on a hopeful note, with Luke and Leia a little older and wiser, looking out at the galaxy. The "happy" Star Wars movies (I, IV, VI) end with celebrations, while the darker ones (III and V) end with hopeful visuals and music to show our characters' indomitable spirits. II is a bit of an outlier in that it ends hopefully right after a long vista of foreboding where you know the victory was an illusion and the bad guys are getting exactly what they want. The hope is somehow more tainted here than in those movies where the situation should actually be hopeless. Does that make sense?
One of the reasons for the backlash against the newer films – and I love "Rogue One" and have mixed feelings about the others, so I'm not suggesting that they're garbage or that you shouldn't like them, but one of the reasons they fall flat with many people is Disney's preoccupation with identity politics and the modern drive for equality. Now, I honestly think the biggest flaw in the original Star Wars movies was the paucity of female and/or non-white characters, so I'm glad Disney has changed that. I think only a small minority of loud bigots has a problem with that. But the issue is how they've gone about it, and nowhere is that more apparent than with Rey. Instead of making an interesting character who happened to be female, their first priority, as they've said themselves, was to make a strong role model for girls to look up to. And that's an honorable goal, to be sure, but then character development for its own sake took a back seat. Rey is often derided as a "Mary Sue" (and although some people find this term sexist, there is a male equivalent, known as Marty Stu or Gary Stu or Jerry Stu) because she can do whatever the plot requires with little or no training, and rarely needs anyone's help, because she has all this power that she hasn't earned. Disney is afraid to do anything that could undermine her image as a strong woman. But they undercut their own message of equality by refusing to hold her to the same standard as previous male protagonists. Anakin and Luke had to go through training and trials to earn their power. In the second movies of their respective trilogies, they both get their hands cut off. Rey, on the other hand (no pun intended), gets bopped on the head. Granted, the hand cutting off thing might be a bit cliché, but they could have done something similarly traumatic.
"The Last Jedi" has more female representation than any previous Star Wars movie, but someone who wrote an article that I read online took the time to calculate that women only had 47% of screen time. She expressed a hope that the next movie would strive for 50%. I mean, really? Really? With all due respect, normal people don't care that much, and they're getting alienated by this level of obsession. Another case in point: there were probably many factors behind "Solo: A Star Wars Story" flopping despite not being that bad of a movie, but one of them was that screenwriter Jon Kasdan felt the need to retcon a long-established character as a pansexual who has sex with his feminist robot. I didn't even think she was that annoying, but many people complained that she was more annoying than Jar Jar Binks, or even reported their theater bursting into applause when she "died". Some people refused to even watch the movie because of their disgust with Disney's direction. Anyway, what I'm saying is that Disney has gotten away from the original objective of telling a fun escapist story of swashbuckling and romance, and is instead making audiences feel preached to about real-world issues. And while that didn't stop their first three entries from being wildly successful, the failure of "Solo" was so bad that they canceled all future spinoff films and admitted they had gone too fast. I hope they make a few course corrections, but I'm sure they'll keep bringing diversity into their projects and that's great. That's not the problem. I think their next priority after gender and skin color should be giving more prominent roles to non-humans, though. It bugs me more and more that there are thousands of intelligent races in the galaxy, yet almost everything important is done by humans.
I mention Star Wars because it was my first real love affair, and that love affair was a vicious cycle, as the relentless mockery of my classmates for being obsessed with Star Wars (yes, really) only gave me more reason to forget about my real life by immersing myself in Star Wars. As soon as "Revenge of the Sith" came out, everyone started pretending they had been into it all along, which pissed me off. Anyway, I honestly think George Lucas is an Aspie. He had more creative control over the prequels and he wrote some godawful ham-fisted dialogue. And lots of people hated that, but I ate it up. I made book covers for my school books out of brown paper bags, and on one of them I wrote several of my favorite quotes from all five Star Wars movies, including some of Anakin's and Padme's most cringeworthy lines. I think George Lucas' need to spoon-feed emotion to the audience resonated with me because he and I were on the same wavelength. As an adult I can see that the dialogue isn't as great as I once thought, but most of it still isn't that bad. It's definitely still a better love story than "Twilight".
When a world is created well, just being in it is a pleasure. I recently replayed "Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, and came so close to one hundred percent completion. I was relaxing after the end of a stressful semester and the non-stop deluge of crap that was 2018 for me. It was the sort of year that made me want to "curse God and die", as I think someone in the scriptures put it. So I was playing this beloved game that had terrible graphics and a very small, constricted world by today's standards, and as I walked or rode my horse back and forth through the mostly empty field completing various side quests – a task that some would obviously consider tedious – I just was having a blast, not because of anything in particular going on at the moment, but because I was in freaking Hyrule. The only reason I needed to enjoy being in this world was that it wasn't Earth. With that in mind I'd like to give the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy another chance if I can ever find the time. I started reading it years ago in high school, but only got a few pages in before I gave up on wading through the description. Now I bet I would bask in every word of Middle Earth.
Of course there are successful exceptions to escapism, like "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas", which is a fiction story about the Holocaust and is obviously supposed to make us feel emotions about how awful the Holocaust was. I think that story works for a few reasons: it's up-front about its agenda, with no attempt to hide behind allegories or parallels, and its events are separated from us by a few decades of history. So it sends a message not to let this happen again, but it doesn't come across as the author condescending to us and telling us why we suck. When I want to learn about current atrocities, that's what non-fiction is for. And satire is a bit different. Douglas Adams frequently mocked the foibles of humanity, but it was played for laughs, and if you want to put deeper thought into it than that you're welcome to, but he doesn't try to force you to do so.
Other reasons for creating stories, especially older and simpler ones, include conveying moral and cultural values to children and creating a mythology for the society to coalesce around and define itself by. I'm almost certain that even these, though, arose as collaries to escapism. I have no doubt that people started making up stories to relieve the daily monotony of hunting, gathering, and dying of diseases that we now have vaccines for. Since there was very little technology or culture to draw on for these stories (e.g. they couldn't craft an oral James Bond novel with no frame of reference for spy gadgets or nations to spy against each other), they crafted stories about talking animals that used magic. These stories often explained some aspect of the natural world – because these were the questions on people's minds in such simple times – but more for entertainment purposes than because someone actually believed a crow carried the sun into the sky.
That gets at another point, though, which is that storytelling is a very old tradition and a fundamental part of being human. As I write this, it's a few hours since I argued with a stranger on Facebook about whether humans are in any way "special" or different from other animals. Now of course I accept evolution and that humans are animals with a lot more than we'd like to think in common with other animals. I learned more about why dating is so stupid from a textbook called "Animal Behavior" than all other sources put together. I love and respect other animals and I hope there's a section of hell reserved for humans who abuse them. But it's just a no-brainer that we're different, such a no-brainer that I didn't know how to articulate it at the time, so instead of taking the time to think it over before responding I sort of dodged the question. I basically said that if we're no different from other animals, then there's no legitimate reason for us not to murder, cannibalize, rape, and shit on the floor like other animals do. And that killed that debate pretty effectively. I don't know what differentiates us as humans that makes us bound to a higher law than other animals, other than being smarter – at least in theory – but I know that we are, and only a psychopath would deny it. Atheists can't explain this either without falling back on philosophical musings with no basis in science. If I recall correctly, Sam Harris tells us in his unbearably smug and arrogant book that only empirically verifiable facts are valid, and then outlines his secular basis for morality – whatever brings the most people the most happiness without harming others, which is not an empirically verifiable fact. If I say that morality is whatever I want to do and everyone else on the planet can suck it, my hypothesis is every bit as valid as the ones proposed by any atheist. Sure, I don't doubt that science can show us why certain moral behaviors are beneficial, but if I don't give a damn about the benefits, it can't tell me why I'm a bad person for not behaving that way. Of course I'm not suggesting that atheists can't be moral people, but if they are, they can't explain why.
If I'd been more interested in introspection than winning arguments, though, I might have considered at least one other thing: humans have imagination. Animals follow a huge spectrum of intelligence, ranging from Donald Trump all the way up to our cousins the orangutans and chimpanzees and gorillas. Most animals, as far as we know, don't even have enough self-awareness to make a mental distinction between themselves and everything else in the world. The more intelligent animals do. A chimpanzee definitely has a sense of its own identity versus the identities of others it interacts with versus its own reflection. But a characteristic that humans possess without equal, as far as we know, is abstract thinking; the ability to think in terms of things that aren't actually there. The ability to plan for a hypothetical future we've never seen, or imagine things that don't exist and possibly never will. Imagination, in another word. And this is why we alone create places and people and events that aren't real, and we alone have the ability to leave the world we know whenever we want. It's actually really sad, given the astronomical level of suffering in the natural world, that other animals don't have this coping mechanism. To tell stories is to be human. So it turns out I'm human after all.
We don't have the same flexibility in telling nonfiction stories, at least if we're honest. We have to be more creative in ascribing form and meaning to people and events we didn't choose. I think that in order to be worth telling a nonfiction story should be funny, warn against repeating mistakes, or both. Nonfiction isn't my chosen field, because I would just as soon forget most of my life, but I had to write some nonfiction essays for Russ Beck and he urged me to expand into a full-length memoir. "Ass Burgers", I'm going to call it. And I'm trying to structure it in such a way that it isn't just me reciting every detail I can remember that nobody cares about. I want people to be able to laugh at my suffering and misadventures in some cases, and I want them to think carefully about how they treat the weird people in their lives or raise their difficult children. The biggest obstacle to getting this finished, unsurprisingly, is that writing about my life is often excruciating. Things I wish had never happened, things I wish had never ended. More surprisingly, the era I yearn for the most is being two to three years old, watching TV and listening to Shelley Duvall's "Sweet Dreams" album in the basement. Of course I didn't grasp then that my life was as simple and carefree and happy as it was ever going to get.
2. Why do you write?
My eighth grade English teacher wrote on one of my assignments, quote, "You have such a unique gift – if you do not pursue writing as your life's passion – I will hunt you down and haunt you forever." Close quote, emphasis in original. The stuff I wrote in eighth grade was actually garbage that hurts to read, but she saw potential in it and that's why they paid her the big bucks. And this was far from the last time somebody has praised my writing, and I'm capable of reading my own writing and other people's writing, so I know that I'm a great writer. The most flattering feedback I ever got, though, was from Emily who used to be in our writing group. One day after class I gave her something to read that I wrote for another class, or maybe she had switched groups and it was the same class, I don't remember, but anyway, I handed her the papers and she squealed with delight. I believe the technical term is "fangirling". It said more than words ever could, but she followed up with, “You're such a great writer. I hope you know that.” And I thought, Oh, I definitely do, but I still love to hear you say it. That's probably why I asked her out. Anyway...
My teacher was right; it would be a sin to let this talent/skill go to waste. I'll never be as good at anything else as I am at this, so why do anything else? I realize this probably sounds very conceited, but I'm just trying to be objective about my strengths, and it would be dishonest to pretend I don't realize how great my writing is. I recognize that it isn't perfect and I have a few specific weaknesses I still need to work on. For example, I can write twenty pages of dialogue and forget to put in much action or description. I think sometimes I'm paralyzed by my fear of using cliches or adverbs. Now that I've finished school (for now) and learned so much, especially from Charles Waugh these last couple semesters, I need to go back through my novel and do a massive revision of the whole thing. And I'm afraid I'll never be satisfied enough to publish it. I'm afraid I'll force myself to publish it, and then think of more ways I could have made it better, and hate myself until I die. Or I could pull a George Lucas and publish a "Special Edition" with controversial changes that turn my fans against me.
A more personal reason is – wait for it – escapism. Writing my own stories in addition to consuming pre-existing ones provides another angle to approach spending as little time in this reality as possible. Going back to Star Wars, I went beyond the movies and consumed all the books I could get my hands on. I had a futile ambition to collect all the Star Wars books ever written. Most of the ones I collected are no longer canon thanks to Disney, but I can't blame them for that when the canon had evolved into such a snafu, with retcon after retcon after retcon required to give it some illusion of consistency. One of my favorites, though, wasn't even quite canon at the time. "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" by Alan Dean Foster was conceived as a potential low-budget sequel in case the original movie flopped, which obviously didn't happen. Harrison Ford hadn't committed to return, so Luke and Leia and Artoo and Threepio are on their own, and they spend most of the book on this swamp planet covered in fog (which would have saved money on sets). Foster inadvertently made some parts of the book rather uncomfortable in hindsight, as he ratcheted up the attraction level between Luke and Leia from mild infatuation to Luke staring at Leia's lips while she sleeps. But anyway, the story follows Luke and Leia trying to beat the Empire to the Temple of Pomojema and the Kaiburr crystal, which could magnify a Force-user's connection to the Force a thousand times over.
I got that book in summer of '05, and then I moved on to seventh grade and suddenly I had two or three study halls and little to do in them. I never studied in high school and I was still third in my class, so that set up a rude awakening in college. But I daydreamed a lot through these study halls, even more so than in regular classes, and space adventures heavily influenced by Star Wars started to take form. My heroes went to a jungle planet to look for... wait for it... a magic crystal with time and space travel capabilities. Now, I honestly don't think I consciously borrowed from the book in this instance, but it was obviously a significant influence. There were other instances where I lifted characters and scenes straight from things like Star Wars, Doctor Who, and the Star Challenge books (a sci-fi "Choose Your Own Adventure" ripoff) and amalgamated them to make my own thing.
Now that I'm a more mature and independent author... I still do that. My daydreams went through a few iterations over the years and finally settled on what I hope is their final iteration in the 2010s. For that, I continued to take bits and pieces from elsewhere, but I was more skillful in my use of them and I cast a wider net, taking in everything from an obscure point-and-click game called "Innocent Until Caught" to an obscure religious text called the Book of Mormon. Somebody said that poor authors imitate; good authors steal. I think it's true. Every good author knows there's no such thing as an original story. So I pick other people's brains and recombine their ideas with my own into something that I hope is uniquely mine. This approach was probably a factor in me actually finishing this novel for the first time.
Writing helps me escape in one other crucial way: from the prison of my own mind. I feel very, very inadequate at verbal communication. The words just don't come together. Mind you, I'm a paradox in that sometimes I can be very witty and say just the right thing to make a roomful of people laugh, but that usually happens when I've been silent while the other people talk and fortuitously manage to insert myself at an opportune moment. I know I'm smart, and I know that some people – I'm not saying everyone – assume I'm stupid. They see the blank dopey look on my face and the awkward way I lurch around and my inability to sound articulate or thoughtful, and they assume I'm stupid and I can tell from the way they condescend. One evening a pair of sister missionaries struck up a conversation with me and started out talking in normal voices, but within a minute or two they had transitioned to "Primary" voices. I don't pick up on vocal inflection that well, but it was so obvious. I have a much better relationship with the current sister missionaries in my ward, though. Just the other day I was feeling suicidal so they came over to be my free therapists.
You know, I don't need people to fall down and worship my intellect, but since it's a thing that exists I would like them to recognize it. So I often feel quite literally trapped behind my weakness in verbal communication. I know anyone who's read my writing knows I'm smart, whether they agree with my political rants or not, but I bet a lot of people would never think to check my writing out because they already think I'm stupid. My words just flow better in writing. The ability to edit at will before posting helps, of course, but even on my first try, any given sentence that I write is bound to be far better than the equivalent sentence if I had tried to articulate it out loud. It unlocks my brain and frees me to communicate what's going on in there. Not too much, though, because nobody wants to know all that. I don't intend to make the whole human race go mad. Putting the words together in writing is both an art and a science. Crafting sentences that express my points clearly with clever and interesting (but not too flowery or pretentious) language, and maybe some jokes or wordplay thrown in for good measure, is a great source of satisfaction. The ability to edit definitely doesn't hurt.
I realized a while ago that I put myself into all my characters. In my novel, there are a couple of female protagonists – that was another breakthrough in getting it finished, actually. I switched the male protagonist I'd been using in my daydreams for his love interest, and gave her a copilot, and I just felt like they were so much more interesting. The characters so far who feel the most authentic and natural to me are women, aliens, or dragons. In fact I still felt like the previous male hero (who was still in the story in a reduced capacity) was boring, so I made him half-alien and only then did he really come alive. Anyway, one of the female protagonists, Jane, inevitably kind of hogs the spotlight because she's an extrovert while her copilot Lillis isn't so much. She's sort of like Shawn Spencer on "Psych", in that she's a talkative goofball who's smarter than she lets on. A couple years after finishing the novel, I realized that Jane is an Aspie. She's kind of weird, and she has this obsession with pre-twenty-second century Earth culture (that literally only started so I could throw in a "Me Jane. You Tarzan?" joke that probably isn't all that funny to begin with), and she was unpopular in high school and never had much luck in love. I realized she's an Aspie, and it all clicked for me. Lillis, without giving too many spoilers, literally has no emotions and can be seen as a sort of Mr. Spock figure; also a potential Aspie icon. Mike, the half-alien, has a very tormented psyche from the conflicting DNA and the racism he deals with; also a potential metaphor for autism. I guess I'm not creative enough.
When done well, as I hope these and others in my novel are, they're real people to me. People sometimes ask, "How do you keep track of all your characters?" and that's like asking how God keeps track of all His children. Really, in my own small way, I am a god to these people because I created them and they're mine. I'm not going to forget their names. I might forget the name of someone I see three days a week all semester, but I won't forget the name of my child. And Jane, for example, really is her own person despite carrying a big piece of my own personality. She hates Latter-day Saints. (That stemmed from a throwaway joke too – Jane and Lillis were getting chased by a bad guy, and Lillis was like "Move move move move move!" and Jane was like "Is he catching up?" and Lillis was like "Worse! Mormon missionaries! They looked right at us!" and I thought that was hilarious but I figured it was out of character for Lillis since she doesn't have emotions, so I switched the lines and then it developed into this whole other aspect of Jane's personality.) It was great fun to write, actually. I like it when characters have their own strong views that I disagree with. I try to present them on their own terms, in a fair light, not as straw men. I could have made Jane look like an idiot and a bigot, but instead I let her have a reasonable backstory and understandable grounds for her negative feelings toward my religion. Saints can be jerks.
That brings me to I guess my last point: I write to share the gospel. Now I know this may mean nothing to your non-LDS classmates, but it's a big deal to me so I thought I ought to mention it. I want to show the world how blessed I am to be a part of this church, and why I believe in it during this age of agnosticism, and why most of the attacks on its doctrine or history are bogus. If God blesses me to become successful in my career and gain a following, I will leverage that success to promote his cause on a wider scale. That was a reason why Latter-day Saints came to figure so heavily in my novel in the first place. It isn't a missionary tract or an apologetic screed by any means, but that stuff's in there to make people think. I also drew on theology in more subtle ways, like when magic is explained. It centers around magic, because I'm following the Indiana Jones formula where it's set in the real world but there's a magical artifact that breaks all the rules he thinks he knows. Someone who knows about the artifact explains that magic is just science that isn't understood yet, and that's directly from Brigham Young's and James E. Talmage's characterization of miracles that I happen to agree with wholeheartedly.
So there's stuff like that which isn't intended or expected to push anybody to get baptized, but is an attempt from me to spread principles of truth in creative ways. I had a non-LDS friend read my novel and she loved it so much that she quoted it on her Facebook wall and printed all 450ish pages out herself (with permission) instead of waiting for it to be polished and published, so I don't think it's too preachy or heavy-handed. But I'll still keep an eye out for that when I do the next revision. In keeping with my philosophy of stories shared earlier, I put this and other "deeper meaning" stuff in to enrich the experience, especially multiple readings, but my highest priority by far, the ultimate purpose of the novel, is to create an exciting space adventure. If people read it and get a feeling comparable to watching Star Wars for the first time, then I will have succeeded and can die happy as long as I also make money off it. In terms of being open about my religion, I guess I just hope that someday I can be a prominent, respected figure that people can look at, whether they agree with me or not, and go, "He's an intelligent, honest person who believes in this God/religion stuff, so obviously it isn't stupid." Even now – and this is the most simultaneously noble and self-serving things I've ever done – I'll sometimes see some troll bitching about how stupid and/or brainwashed Mormons or religious people in general are, and I'll post a link to my website and (sarcastically) ask them to look it over and see just how stupid and/or brainwashed I am. I try to recognize the limits of my intellect, but I have that much confidence in it.
3. Is it easier to communicate online and why?
For sure, because it gives everyone else more or less the same handicap as me. Kiss your precious non-verbal cues and vocal inflections good-bye! People complain about how it's so easy to misinterpret meaning online for these reasons, and I'm like, "Try being me every day." So there's that, but then I also happen to be a much better writer than most people, so I actually have an advantage in communicating that I'm not otherwise accustomed to. Sometimes I miss in-text sarcasm that's obvious to everyone else, but that's very rare. On the other hand, I often notice that things are clear satire while other people take them seriously and get outraged, but maybe that's just because they're stupid.
Another aspect that I find very useful is the ability to cite sources via internet links. Whereas in person, I would have to try to remember what the facts of the matter are in addition to articulating them accurately and convincingly and then hope the other person will take my word for it, online I can brush up on them from another source before writing them in my own words and embedding the source in the post or Facebook comment itself. I try to use reliable sources. Of course I'm not infallible, but I'm an honest person and I try not to believe or spread anything that isn't true, no matter how convenient. I originally shared the thing about Nathan Phillips being harassed by Trump supporters, and when I found out it was a lie I was so pissed that I shared several things and spent a couple hours writing a blog post about what a lie it was. Sometimes I have to use sketchy right-wing sources for things that the mainstream media has opted not to cover well or at all, but I try to be careful about that and avoid it when possible. This is the era of confirmation bias and fake news and I try hard to not be a part of that.
The one major disadvantage of communicating online is that stupid or ignorant things I do say might end up floating around forever. I know that especially when I was in middle and high school just getting into email and then social media, I was far more socially inept than I am now and frankly came across as a huge creep several times. There are some things you just aren't supposed to say out loud, especially if you're male. I understand that women have to worry a lot more about men than vice-versa. Mentally ill or challenged women have a lot more leeway to say weird things without making people uncomfortable, especially if they're attractive at all. And you know, my hometown was a hotspot for sex offenders after they got out of prison and wanted to be left alone. A friend once described it as "half Christians, half Mormons, and half sex offenders". So I knew that we needed to be wary of them and I knew that none of my sisters could ever walk down the street without me or a parent, but it never occurred to me that a woman has to see every man, including me, as a potential predator. I knew I would never harm anyone and it never occurred to me that everyone else doesn't know that. I eventually figured that out and at some point in my adult life I read an article that was basically like "If you're a socially awkward male, women aren't just not attracted to you, but actually think you're going to rape them", and I took that to heart and stopped talking to women unless they talk to me first.
That's more a concern about how I come across in person with my damn awkwardness, because I've come light-years in communicating online, thank God. I hate myself when I look back on compliments and things I wrote that were undoubtedly weird. And sometimes I was just plain annoying. I've probably lost at least two hundred Facebook friends for being annoying. Oops. But if the stupid things I said weren't in writing, I would still replay them in my memory ad nauseam with the other stupid things I've said out loud, so I guess it doesn't really matter. I said a lot of stupid things out loud in high school out of my desperate attempts to be popular. The popular guys I sat with at lunch were always telling dead baby jokes, Helen Keller jokes, woman on her period jokes, woman in the kitchen jokes, your mom jokes, and that's what she said jokes. The girls who sat with us would just smile and roll their eyes as if to say, "You guys are idiots but we enjoy your company." I just wanted to be like them, but when I tried to emulate their behavior, I didn't get the same positive reactions. Maybe they weren't popular because they said those things, but they got away with saying those things because they were popular. Maybe, as Trump proved years later, no publicity is bad publicity if you just don't give a crap.
In conclusion, I hope something in this jumbled mess is helpful to your project. It's an honor to participate. Let me know if you want any additions or clarifications. I am exhausted so I may have said stupid, incomprehensible, and/or misspelled things.
Thank you so much! I can tell that you put some real effort into answering my questions. I appreciate it. You went above and beyond! :) I admire the thoughtful and intelligent insights you've shared in class, on your blog, etc. So I really appreciate that you went out of your way to help me. :) You're awesome
1. What are your thoughts and feelings about writing and stories in general?
Writing isn't something most people can do well, but in theory, it provides unparalleled opportunities to create things. Most people will never be able to create a blockbuster movie with cutting-edge special effects, but almost anyone with access to writing materials and sufficient training and practice could write the book version that creates a movie in people's minds. Every art form is different and I'm not the type to proclaim that written stories are inherently superior to movies, but that is one advantage they offer. With the rise of computes and the internet, people have more opportunities to share their writing than ever before. I publish on my blog every week for free (I pay for the Premium version of my website, but the blog feature is free) and sometimes I marvel that I have such an opportunity at such a young age. If I had been born twenty, even ten years ago, I wouldn't have. But then I look at my youngest sister who was practically born with a computer at her fingertips and can draw better with a mouse than I can with a pencil, so whatever. I still sometimes get lazy and wish I could just beam my sentences straight from my head onto the page, and I'm sure my grandchildren, in the unlikely event that I ever get married and adopt children, will have the technology to do that. I'll have more to say about my own experience with writing after the next question.
In my opinion most good fiction stories, whether told orally or in books or movies or games or whatever, provide an escape from our crappy lives. An extreme example I read about recently was a group of Jewish girls in a concentration camp who smuggled in a copy of “Gone With the Wind” and risked their lives to read it together every evening. For a few moments every evening, they got to be somewhere that wasn't a concentration camp, and that was worth their lives to them. Most of us will never have to suffer as they did (knock on wood) but no matter how privileged we are, we all have plenty of suffering that we'd just as soon get away from regardless. Life is suffering. Escapism works if it's a "happy" story where we get to experience the satisfaction of justice and good prevailing that so seldom comes along in real life, but it also works if it's a "sad" or even "scary" story where we get to experience a cathartic release of negative emotions, which are healthy and necessary, without any real stakes or losses. It's okay, even great for fiction stories to have parallels to real life and commentary on real issues, but that usually needs to be subtle and cautious or it just comes across to me as preachy and annoying. I'm very aware of how terrible the world is and don't need to be reminded of that when I'm trying to be entertained.
Escapism doesn't mean a work has to be shallow or mind-numbing. The original Star Wars is neither, but it skyrocketed to astronomical popularity in part because people were tired of watching cynical, gritty movies that reflected the cynical, gritty seventies. Why watch a movie to stay right where you are when you could travel a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away? The sequel, spoiler alert, is much quieter, much bleaker. The good guys lose everything. Their base is destroyed, most of the nameless characters who don't have script immunity are killed, and the protagonists lose everything and face the prospect of starting from scratch. And yet it's widely considered to be the best Star Wars film of all time, because of these bold edgy choices but because it still works as escapism. It's still an adventure set in space. The evil might prevail for a time, but that means nothing to our real lives. We can be emotionally invested and experience those feelings without being too emotionally invested because the heroes' losses cost us nothing. The only stakes are the ones set in place for the conclusion of the trilogy. And it ends on a hopeful note, with Luke and Leia a little older and wiser, looking out at the galaxy. The "happy" Star Wars movies (I, IV, VI) end with celebrations, while the darker ones (III and V) end with hopeful visuals and music to show our characters' indomitable spirits. II is a bit of an outlier in that it ends hopefully right after a long vista of foreboding where you know the victory was an illusion and the bad guys are getting exactly what they want. The hope is somehow more tainted here than in those movies where the situation should actually be hopeless. Does that make sense?
One of the reasons for the backlash against the newer films – and I love "Rogue One" and have mixed feelings about the others, so I'm not suggesting that they're garbage or that you shouldn't like them, but one of the reasons they fall flat with many people is Disney's preoccupation with identity politics and the modern drive for equality. Now, I honestly think the biggest flaw in the original Star Wars movies was the paucity of female and/or non-white characters, so I'm glad Disney has changed that. I think only a small minority of loud bigots has a problem with that. But the issue is how they've gone about it, and nowhere is that more apparent than with Rey. Instead of making an interesting character who happened to be female, their first priority, as they've said themselves, was to make a strong role model for girls to look up to. And that's an honorable goal, to be sure, but then character development for its own sake took a back seat. Rey is often derided as a "Mary Sue" (and although some people find this term sexist, there is a male equivalent, known as Marty Stu or Gary Stu or Jerry Stu) because she can do whatever the plot requires with little or no training, and rarely needs anyone's help, because she has all this power that she hasn't earned. Disney is afraid to do anything that could undermine her image as a strong woman. But they undercut their own message of equality by refusing to hold her to the same standard as previous male protagonists. Anakin and Luke had to go through training and trials to earn their power. In the second movies of their respective trilogies, they both get their hands cut off. Rey, on the other hand (no pun intended), gets bopped on the head. Granted, the hand cutting off thing might be a bit cliché, but they could have done something similarly traumatic.
"The Last Jedi" has more female representation than any previous Star Wars movie, but someone who wrote an article that I read online took the time to calculate that women only had 47% of screen time. She expressed a hope that the next movie would strive for 50%. I mean, really? Really? With all due respect, normal people don't care that much, and they're getting alienated by this level of obsession. Another case in point: there were probably many factors behind "Solo: A Star Wars Story" flopping despite not being that bad of a movie, but one of them was that screenwriter Jon Kasdan felt the need to retcon a long-established character as a pansexual who has sex with his feminist robot. I didn't even think she was that annoying, but many people complained that she was more annoying than Jar Jar Binks, or even reported their theater bursting into applause when she "died". Some people refused to even watch the movie because of their disgust with Disney's direction. Anyway, what I'm saying is that Disney has gotten away from the original objective of telling a fun escapist story of swashbuckling and romance, and is instead making audiences feel preached to about real-world issues. And while that didn't stop their first three entries from being wildly successful, the failure of "Solo" was so bad that they canceled all future spinoff films and admitted they had gone too fast. I hope they make a few course corrections, but I'm sure they'll keep bringing diversity into their projects and that's great. That's not the problem. I think their next priority after gender and skin color should be giving more prominent roles to non-humans, though. It bugs me more and more that there are thousands of intelligent races in the galaxy, yet almost everything important is done by humans.
I mention Star Wars because it was my first real love affair, and that love affair was a vicious cycle, as the relentless mockery of my classmates for being obsessed with Star Wars (yes, really) only gave me more reason to forget about my real life by immersing myself in Star Wars. As soon as "Revenge of the Sith" came out, everyone started pretending they had been into it all along, which pissed me off. Anyway, I honestly think George Lucas is an Aspie. He had more creative control over the prequels and he wrote some godawful ham-fisted dialogue. And lots of people hated that, but I ate it up. I made book covers for my school books out of brown paper bags, and on one of them I wrote several of my favorite quotes from all five Star Wars movies, including some of Anakin's and Padme's most cringeworthy lines. I think George Lucas' need to spoon-feed emotion to the audience resonated with me because he and I were on the same wavelength. As an adult I can see that the dialogue isn't as great as I once thought, but most of it still isn't that bad. It's definitely still a better love story than "Twilight".
When a world is created well, just being in it is a pleasure. I recently replayed "Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, and came so close to one hundred percent completion. I was relaxing after the end of a stressful semester and the non-stop deluge of crap that was 2018 for me. It was the sort of year that made me want to "curse God and die", as I think someone in the scriptures put it. So I was playing this beloved game that had terrible graphics and a very small, constricted world by today's standards, and as I walked or rode my horse back and forth through the mostly empty field completing various side quests – a task that some would obviously consider tedious – I just was having a blast, not because of anything in particular going on at the moment, but because I was in freaking Hyrule. The only reason I needed to enjoy being in this world was that it wasn't Earth. With that in mind I'd like to give the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy another chance if I can ever find the time. I started reading it years ago in high school, but only got a few pages in before I gave up on wading through the description. Now I bet I would bask in every word of Middle Earth.
Of course there are successful exceptions to escapism, like "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas", which is a fiction story about the Holocaust and is obviously supposed to make us feel emotions about how awful the Holocaust was. I think that story works for a few reasons: it's up-front about its agenda, with no attempt to hide behind allegories or parallels, and its events are separated from us by a few decades of history. So it sends a message not to let this happen again, but it doesn't come across as the author condescending to us and telling us why we suck. When I want to learn about current atrocities, that's what non-fiction is for. And satire is a bit different. Douglas Adams frequently mocked the foibles of humanity, but it was played for laughs, and if you want to put deeper thought into it than that you're welcome to, but he doesn't try to force you to do so.
Other reasons for creating stories, especially older and simpler ones, include conveying moral and cultural values to children and creating a mythology for the society to coalesce around and define itself by. I'm almost certain that even these, though, arose as collaries to escapism. I have no doubt that people started making up stories to relieve the daily monotony of hunting, gathering, and dying of diseases that we now have vaccines for. Since there was very little technology or culture to draw on for these stories (e.g. they couldn't craft an oral James Bond novel with no frame of reference for spy gadgets or nations to spy against each other), they crafted stories about talking animals that used magic. These stories often explained some aspect of the natural world – because these were the questions on people's minds in such simple times – but more for entertainment purposes than because someone actually believed a crow carried the sun into the sky.
That gets at another point, though, which is that storytelling is a very old tradition and a fundamental part of being human. As I write this, it's a few hours since I argued with a stranger on Facebook about whether humans are in any way "special" or different from other animals. Now of course I accept evolution and that humans are animals with a lot more than we'd like to think in common with other animals. I learned more about why dating is so stupid from a textbook called "Animal Behavior" than all other sources put together. I love and respect other animals and I hope there's a section of hell reserved for humans who abuse them. But it's just a no-brainer that we're different, such a no-brainer that I didn't know how to articulate it at the time, so instead of taking the time to think it over before responding I sort of dodged the question. I basically said that if we're no different from other animals, then there's no legitimate reason for us not to murder, cannibalize, rape, and shit on the floor like other animals do. And that killed that debate pretty effectively. I don't know what differentiates us as humans that makes us bound to a higher law than other animals, other than being smarter – at least in theory – but I know that we are, and only a psychopath would deny it. Atheists can't explain this either without falling back on philosophical musings with no basis in science. If I recall correctly, Sam Harris tells us in his unbearably smug and arrogant book that only empirically verifiable facts are valid, and then outlines his secular basis for morality – whatever brings the most people the most happiness without harming others, which is not an empirically verifiable fact. If I say that morality is whatever I want to do and everyone else on the planet can suck it, my hypothesis is every bit as valid as the ones proposed by any atheist. Sure, I don't doubt that science can show us why certain moral behaviors are beneficial, but if I don't give a damn about the benefits, it can't tell me why I'm a bad person for not behaving that way. Of course I'm not suggesting that atheists can't be moral people, but if they are, they can't explain why.
If I'd been more interested in introspection than winning arguments, though, I might have considered at least one other thing: humans have imagination. Animals follow a huge spectrum of intelligence, ranging from Donald Trump all the way up to our cousins the orangutans and chimpanzees and gorillas. Most animals, as far as we know, don't even have enough self-awareness to make a mental distinction between themselves and everything else in the world. The more intelligent animals do. A chimpanzee definitely has a sense of its own identity versus the identities of others it interacts with versus its own reflection. But a characteristic that humans possess without equal, as far as we know, is abstract thinking; the ability to think in terms of things that aren't actually there. The ability to plan for a hypothetical future we've never seen, or imagine things that don't exist and possibly never will. Imagination, in another word. And this is why we alone create places and people and events that aren't real, and we alone have the ability to leave the world we know whenever we want. It's actually really sad, given the astronomical level of suffering in the natural world, that other animals don't have this coping mechanism. To tell stories is to be human. So it turns out I'm human after all.
We don't have the same flexibility in telling nonfiction stories, at least if we're honest. We have to be more creative in ascribing form and meaning to people and events we didn't choose. I think that in order to be worth telling a nonfiction story should be funny, warn against repeating mistakes, or both. Nonfiction isn't my chosen field, because I would just as soon forget most of my life, but I had to write some nonfiction essays for Russ Beck and he urged me to expand into a full-length memoir. "Ass Burgers", I'm going to call it. And I'm trying to structure it in such a way that it isn't just me reciting every detail I can remember that nobody cares about. I want people to be able to laugh at my suffering and misadventures in some cases, and I want them to think carefully about how they treat the weird people in their lives or raise their difficult children. The biggest obstacle to getting this finished, unsurprisingly, is that writing about my life is often excruciating. Things I wish had never happened, things I wish had never ended. More surprisingly, the era I yearn for the most is being two to three years old, watching TV and listening to Shelley Duvall's "Sweet Dreams" album in the basement. Of course I didn't grasp then that my life was as simple and carefree and happy as it was ever going to get.
2. Why do you write?
My eighth grade English teacher wrote on one of my assignments, quote, "You have such a unique gift – if you do not pursue writing as your life's passion – I will hunt you down and haunt you forever." Close quote, emphasis in original. The stuff I wrote in eighth grade was actually garbage that hurts to read, but she saw potential in it and that's why they paid her the big bucks. And this was far from the last time somebody has praised my writing, and I'm capable of reading my own writing and other people's writing, so I know that I'm a great writer. The most flattering feedback I ever got, though, was from Emily who used to be in our writing group. One day after class I gave her something to read that I wrote for another class, or maybe she had switched groups and it was the same class, I don't remember, but anyway, I handed her the papers and she squealed with delight. I believe the technical term is "fangirling". It said more than words ever could, but she followed up with, “You're such a great writer. I hope you know that.” And I thought, Oh, I definitely do, but I still love to hear you say it. That's probably why I asked her out. Anyway...
My teacher was right; it would be a sin to let this talent/skill go to waste. I'll never be as good at anything else as I am at this, so why do anything else? I realize this probably sounds very conceited, but I'm just trying to be objective about my strengths, and it would be dishonest to pretend I don't realize how great my writing is. I recognize that it isn't perfect and I have a few specific weaknesses I still need to work on. For example, I can write twenty pages of dialogue and forget to put in much action or description. I think sometimes I'm paralyzed by my fear of using cliches or adverbs. Now that I've finished school (for now) and learned so much, especially from Charles Waugh these last couple semesters, I need to go back through my novel and do a massive revision of the whole thing. And I'm afraid I'll never be satisfied enough to publish it. I'm afraid I'll force myself to publish it, and then think of more ways I could have made it better, and hate myself until I die. Or I could pull a George Lucas and publish a "Special Edition" with controversial changes that turn my fans against me.
A more personal reason is – wait for it – escapism. Writing my own stories in addition to consuming pre-existing ones provides another angle to approach spending as little time in this reality as possible. Going back to Star Wars, I went beyond the movies and consumed all the books I could get my hands on. I had a futile ambition to collect all the Star Wars books ever written. Most of the ones I collected are no longer canon thanks to Disney, but I can't blame them for that when the canon had evolved into such a snafu, with retcon after retcon after retcon required to give it some illusion of consistency. One of my favorites, though, wasn't even quite canon at the time. "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" by Alan Dean Foster was conceived as a potential low-budget sequel in case the original movie flopped, which obviously didn't happen. Harrison Ford hadn't committed to return, so Luke and Leia and Artoo and Threepio are on their own, and they spend most of the book on this swamp planet covered in fog (which would have saved money on sets). Foster inadvertently made some parts of the book rather uncomfortable in hindsight, as he ratcheted up the attraction level between Luke and Leia from mild infatuation to Luke staring at Leia's lips while she sleeps. But anyway, the story follows Luke and Leia trying to beat the Empire to the Temple of Pomojema and the Kaiburr crystal, which could magnify a Force-user's connection to the Force a thousand times over.
I got that book in summer of '05, and then I moved on to seventh grade and suddenly I had two or three study halls and little to do in them. I never studied in high school and I was still third in my class, so that set up a rude awakening in college. But I daydreamed a lot through these study halls, even more so than in regular classes, and space adventures heavily influenced by Star Wars started to take form. My heroes went to a jungle planet to look for... wait for it... a magic crystal with time and space travel capabilities. Now, I honestly don't think I consciously borrowed from the book in this instance, but it was obviously a significant influence. There were other instances where I lifted characters and scenes straight from things like Star Wars, Doctor Who, and the Star Challenge books (a sci-fi "Choose Your Own Adventure" ripoff) and amalgamated them to make my own thing.
Now that I'm a more mature and independent author... I still do that. My daydreams went through a few iterations over the years and finally settled on what I hope is their final iteration in the 2010s. For that, I continued to take bits and pieces from elsewhere, but I was more skillful in my use of them and I cast a wider net, taking in everything from an obscure point-and-click game called "Innocent Until Caught" to an obscure religious text called the Book of Mormon. Somebody said that poor authors imitate; good authors steal. I think it's true. Every good author knows there's no such thing as an original story. So I pick other people's brains and recombine their ideas with my own into something that I hope is uniquely mine. This approach was probably a factor in me actually finishing this novel for the first time.
Writing helps me escape in one other crucial way: from the prison of my own mind. I feel very, very inadequate at verbal communication. The words just don't come together. Mind you, I'm a paradox in that sometimes I can be very witty and say just the right thing to make a roomful of people laugh, but that usually happens when I've been silent while the other people talk and fortuitously manage to insert myself at an opportune moment. I know I'm smart, and I know that some people – I'm not saying everyone – assume I'm stupid. They see the blank dopey look on my face and the awkward way I lurch around and my inability to sound articulate or thoughtful, and they assume I'm stupid and I can tell from the way they condescend. One evening a pair of sister missionaries struck up a conversation with me and started out talking in normal voices, but within a minute or two they had transitioned to "Primary" voices. I don't pick up on vocal inflection that well, but it was so obvious. I have a much better relationship with the current sister missionaries in my ward, though. Just the other day I was feeling suicidal so they came over to be my free therapists.
You know, I don't need people to fall down and worship my intellect, but since it's a thing that exists I would like them to recognize it. So I often feel quite literally trapped behind my weakness in verbal communication. I know anyone who's read my writing knows I'm smart, whether they agree with my political rants or not, but I bet a lot of people would never think to check my writing out because they already think I'm stupid. My words just flow better in writing. The ability to edit at will before posting helps, of course, but even on my first try, any given sentence that I write is bound to be far better than the equivalent sentence if I had tried to articulate it out loud. It unlocks my brain and frees me to communicate what's going on in there. Not too much, though, because nobody wants to know all that. I don't intend to make the whole human race go mad. Putting the words together in writing is both an art and a science. Crafting sentences that express my points clearly with clever and interesting (but not too flowery or pretentious) language, and maybe some jokes or wordplay thrown in for good measure, is a great source of satisfaction. The ability to edit definitely doesn't hurt.
I realized a while ago that I put myself into all my characters. In my novel, there are a couple of female protagonists – that was another breakthrough in getting it finished, actually. I switched the male protagonist I'd been using in my daydreams for his love interest, and gave her a copilot, and I just felt like they were so much more interesting. The characters so far who feel the most authentic and natural to me are women, aliens, or dragons. In fact I still felt like the previous male hero (who was still in the story in a reduced capacity) was boring, so I made him half-alien and only then did he really come alive. Anyway, one of the female protagonists, Jane, inevitably kind of hogs the spotlight because she's an extrovert while her copilot Lillis isn't so much. She's sort of like Shawn Spencer on "Psych", in that she's a talkative goofball who's smarter than she lets on. A couple years after finishing the novel, I realized that Jane is an Aspie. She's kind of weird, and she has this obsession with pre-twenty-second century Earth culture (that literally only started so I could throw in a "Me Jane. You Tarzan?" joke that probably isn't all that funny to begin with), and she was unpopular in high school and never had much luck in love. I realized she's an Aspie, and it all clicked for me. Lillis, without giving too many spoilers, literally has no emotions and can be seen as a sort of Mr. Spock figure; also a potential Aspie icon. Mike, the half-alien, has a very tormented psyche from the conflicting DNA and the racism he deals with; also a potential metaphor for autism. I guess I'm not creative enough.
When done well, as I hope these and others in my novel are, they're real people to me. People sometimes ask, "How do you keep track of all your characters?" and that's like asking how God keeps track of all His children. Really, in my own small way, I am a god to these people because I created them and they're mine. I'm not going to forget their names. I might forget the name of someone I see three days a week all semester, but I won't forget the name of my child. And Jane, for example, really is her own person despite carrying a big piece of my own personality. She hates Latter-day Saints. (That stemmed from a throwaway joke too – Jane and Lillis were getting chased by a bad guy, and Lillis was like "Move move move move move!" and Jane was like "Is he catching up?" and Lillis was like "Worse! Mormon missionaries! They looked right at us!" and I thought that was hilarious but I figured it was out of character for Lillis since she doesn't have emotions, so I switched the lines and then it developed into this whole other aspect of Jane's personality.) It was great fun to write, actually. I like it when characters have their own strong views that I disagree with. I try to present them on their own terms, in a fair light, not as straw men. I could have made Jane look like an idiot and a bigot, but instead I let her have a reasonable backstory and understandable grounds for her negative feelings toward my religion. Saints can be jerks.
That brings me to I guess my last point: I write to share the gospel. Now I know this may mean nothing to your non-LDS classmates, but it's a big deal to me so I thought I ought to mention it. I want to show the world how blessed I am to be a part of this church, and why I believe in it during this age of agnosticism, and why most of the attacks on its doctrine or history are bogus. If God blesses me to become successful in my career and gain a following, I will leverage that success to promote his cause on a wider scale. That was a reason why Latter-day Saints came to figure so heavily in my novel in the first place. It isn't a missionary tract or an apologetic screed by any means, but that stuff's in there to make people think. I also drew on theology in more subtle ways, like when magic is explained. It centers around magic, because I'm following the Indiana Jones formula where it's set in the real world but there's a magical artifact that breaks all the rules he thinks he knows. Someone who knows about the artifact explains that magic is just science that isn't understood yet, and that's directly from Brigham Young's and James E. Talmage's characterization of miracles that I happen to agree with wholeheartedly.
So there's stuff like that which isn't intended or expected to push anybody to get baptized, but is an attempt from me to spread principles of truth in creative ways. I had a non-LDS friend read my novel and she loved it so much that she quoted it on her Facebook wall and printed all 450ish pages out herself (with permission) instead of waiting for it to be polished and published, so I don't think it's too preachy or heavy-handed. But I'll still keep an eye out for that when I do the next revision. In keeping with my philosophy of stories shared earlier, I put this and other "deeper meaning" stuff in to enrich the experience, especially multiple readings, but my highest priority by far, the ultimate purpose of the novel, is to create an exciting space adventure. If people read it and get a feeling comparable to watching Star Wars for the first time, then I will have succeeded and can die happy as long as I also make money off it. In terms of being open about my religion, I guess I just hope that someday I can be a prominent, respected figure that people can look at, whether they agree with me or not, and go, "He's an intelligent, honest person who believes in this God/religion stuff, so obviously it isn't stupid." Even now – and this is the most simultaneously noble and self-serving things I've ever done – I'll sometimes see some troll bitching about how stupid and/or brainwashed Mormons or religious people in general are, and I'll post a link to my website and (sarcastically) ask them to look it over and see just how stupid and/or brainwashed I am. I try to recognize the limits of my intellect, but I have that much confidence in it.
3. Is it easier to communicate online and why?
For sure, because it gives everyone else more or less the same handicap as me. Kiss your precious non-verbal cues and vocal inflections good-bye! People complain about how it's so easy to misinterpret meaning online for these reasons, and I'm like, "Try being me every day." So there's that, but then I also happen to be a much better writer than most people, so I actually have an advantage in communicating that I'm not otherwise accustomed to. Sometimes I miss in-text sarcasm that's obvious to everyone else, but that's very rare. On the other hand, I often notice that things are clear satire while other people take them seriously and get outraged, but maybe that's just because they're stupid.
Another aspect that I find very useful is the ability to cite sources via internet links. Whereas in person, I would have to try to remember what the facts of the matter are in addition to articulating them accurately and convincingly and then hope the other person will take my word for it, online I can brush up on them from another source before writing them in my own words and embedding the source in the post or Facebook comment itself. I try to use reliable sources. Of course I'm not infallible, but I'm an honest person and I try not to believe or spread anything that isn't true, no matter how convenient. I originally shared the thing about Nathan Phillips being harassed by Trump supporters, and when I found out it was a lie I was so pissed that I shared several things and spent a couple hours writing a blog post about what a lie it was. Sometimes I have to use sketchy right-wing sources for things that the mainstream media has opted not to cover well or at all, but I try to be careful about that and avoid it when possible. This is the era of confirmation bias and fake news and I try hard to not be a part of that.
The one major disadvantage of communicating online is that stupid or ignorant things I do say might end up floating around forever. I know that especially when I was in middle and high school just getting into email and then social media, I was far more socially inept than I am now and frankly came across as a huge creep several times. There are some things you just aren't supposed to say out loud, especially if you're male. I understand that women have to worry a lot more about men than vice-versa. Mentally ill or challenged women have a lot more leeway to say weird things without making people uncomfortable, especially if they're attractive at all. And you know, my hometown was a hotspot for sex offenders after they got out of prison and wanted to be left alone. A friend once described it as "half Christians, half Mormons, and half sex offenders". So I knew that we needed to be wary of them and I knew that none of my sisters could ever walk down the street without me or a parent, but it never occurred to me that a woman has to see every man, including me, as a potential predator. I knew I would never harm anyone and it never occurred to me that everyone else doesn't know that. I eventually figured that out and at some point in my adult life I read an article that was basically like "If you're a socially awkward male, women aren't just not attracted to you, but actually think you're going to rape them", and I took that to heart and stopped talking to women unless they talk to me first.
That's more a concern about how I come across in person with my damn awkwardness, because I've come light-years in communicating online, thank God. I hate myself when I look back on compliments and things I wrote that were undoubtedly weird. And sometimes I was just plain annoying. I've probably lost at least two hundred Facebook friends for being annoying. Oops. But if the stupid things I said weren't in writing, I would still replay them in my memory ad nauseam with the other stupid things I've said out loud, so I guess it doesn't really matter. I said a lot of stupid things out loud in high school out of my desperate attempts to be popular. The popular guys I sat with at lunch were always telling dead baby jokes, Helen Keller jokes, woman on her period jokes, woman in the kitchen jokes, your mom jokes, and that's what she said jokes. The girls who sat with us would just smile and roll their eyes as if to say, "You guys are idiots but we enjoy your company." I just wanted to be like them, but when I tried to emulate their behavior, I didn't get the same positive reactions. Maybe they weren't popular because they said those things, but they got away with saying those things because they were popular. Maybe, as Trump proved years later, no publicity is bad publicity if you just don't give a crap.
In conclusion, I hope something in this jumbled mess is helpful to your project. It's an honor to participate. Let me know if you want any additions or clarifications. I am exhausted so I may have said stupid, incomprehensible, and/or misspelled things.
Thank you so much! I can tell that you put some real effort into answering my questions. I appreciate it. You went above and beyond! :) I admire the thoughtful and intelligent insights you've shared in class, on your blog, etc. So I really appreciate that you went out of your way to help me. :) You're awesome
