Die By the Pen: Meditations on Bubbles
In Die By the Pen, Jared Gniewek discusses what feeds his fires as an author of comics, screenplays and radio dramas.
I am at the summer place now. My family purchased a group of cabins on the top of a mountain in the Catskills thirty-nine years ago and they allowed me a week up here at my mother’s cabin for meditative writing.
I am always looking for places from which to write. It seems every location I’m in favors a different style and here, all alone, being kept company by the bears and skunks, I find I let myself think a little more freely. If you can imagine your old buddy, Jared, singing with songbirds and getting beavers to sweep his floor then you got the idea of what it’s like up here.
My friend, and girlfriend’s mother, Carol brought up some giant bubble wands for my neices last weekend and of course I went to work on them. The girls never had a chance to play with them. Consider it an Uncle Tax.
I get obsessive when it’s time to make the bubbles. I’ve always enjoyed their temporary nature. A thing of singular beauty bopping along until an insect or a quick change in the direction of the breeze causes it to pop in a spectacular way.
I can go all day with ’em. The larger wand with a curved spiderweb profile at the end proved to be quite difficult and I found that only one out ten attempts worked. Even rarer, was the bubble which stayed together longer than a few seconds once free of the device.
I was at it all afternoon and I got to thinking about the nature of bubbles after I created one that drifted off the wand and floated up and away into the sky until I could only see the refractions of light on it and eventually watched it just disappear over the tree line. It’s probably still up there somewhere, avoiding airplanes and flocks of birds with a fool’s luck. I like to hope.
A bubble is little more than a puff of air trapped in a bit of soap, glycerine, and water. It is a fine membrane easily broken. The creation of a remarkable bubble can be a difficult endeavor. It can take a long time of dipping wands and blowing into them or holding them up to the wind or swiping them back and forth. Why, it can (and did) take all afternoon to get just the right amount of air into your bubble and then slightly twist the wand to close it off. That can be the hardest part – ending it. We’ve all seen mammoth liquid shapes emerge from wands only to burst into dew the moment we attempt to free it. But when everything comes together in our making and sealing of it, and the elements are right for it, well… a bubble could float up and out of our sight. It could fly forever. Science be damned.
Such is the crafting of stories. We, as writers need to see the story as an object. A most fragile object. One that any false move can cause to end too soon. We need to remember to control our exertion of force over the story. We can let the air run through it and let it right itself. We only need to control the wand and end it before it gets too big and can’t sustain itself.
The sealing off of a story. This can be the most delicate of prospects. We need to end it in such a way that it becomes something whole. Something that will stay afloat in a reader’s memory for a time. A jumble of scenes and dialogue with a twist ending will be a jumble of lines and the twist will be the only truly memorable part.
Twists are a fine way to end a story but if you aren’t careful the story can become less than an object. It becomes a framing device for a memorable moment. One must worry as much about the cohesion of the parts leading up to the twist as to the ending itself. After all, it is merely a punchline and all too often tellers of jokes ignore the opening lines as the first steps towards the punchline and obsess over the delivery at the end. A story, like a joke (or a bubble) is one thing. One object.
As you are writing be aware that the potential direction can simply be the way the wind is blowing. There is no need to fight the natural direction of the piece. Let the wind fill it and carry it. Just the same, a great feat it is when a bubble floats against the wind. Your story could be a miracle. It is a true miracle when you move it in unnatural directions.
It could very well just as easily splatter the grass with slippery soap so be aware of the risk.
Jared Gniewek is a freelance writer whose work can be seen in the recent re-launch of Tales from the Crypt and heard on The Dark Sense, an audio anthology of the macabre for which he is also the story editor — http://www.earstage.com/darksense.htm.
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