96: When Do You, Release The Kraken?

A little over Thirty years ago, I was fortunate enough to attend a Film and Screenwriting Course at the Aspen Writers Conference. The course was taught by Ira Wood, a Fiction Novelist who went to Hollywood to write a Screenplay for his best selling novel The Kitchen Man. He used two books by Syd Field, Screenplay, and The Screenwriter’s Workbook, as a course syllabus. I was immediately enamored to the course by the beginning quote. “Writing is a personal responsibility -- either you do it, or you don’t.” I didn’t know at the time just how prophetic that quote would become in my writing life. You see I chose the latter, not to write for many years. All the essentials were there for my writing success. I chose not to write. I wanted to write. I had the ability to attend the best writing classes the motivation to do so and to participate in the process. However, like many people have told me in my life, Al you are your own worst enemy. I let life get in my writing way. Oh yeah I dabbled with poems here, a fiction story there, I said things like, “Writing is just a hobby, it’s not what I do for my living!” No wonder writing has just been my hobby and has never become what I do for a living. I don’t need to have an Avalanche roll over me, to get the point. I guess unless you structure you life around your writing and not the opposite it will always be a hobby and not a living. Now that I have retired it is time to move forward with years of writing projects. Working on several long range projects. My short stories about my mentor will be woven into a novel about my early writing years and later years in Colorado and finish in Cortina, Italy. The location of the 2026 Winter Olympics, Milano Cortina.

Both Ira Wood and Syd Field have said, “A screenplay is s story told with pictures.” I have just decided to go back to the Film and Screenwriting notebooks pull out my screenplay about The sale of Arapahoe Basin to the Ralston Purina Corporation in 1978 and polish the opening act that I have already written and to finish the project. (I am not foolish enough to think it a simple task! You must Conquer it or it will forever Conquer you.)

 So Picture this, I feel like Poseidon in the new re-make movie Clash of the Titans and I’m the God of my own destiny and I’m getting ready to say, “Release the Kraken.” 

Albert Bianchine

Writing, The Art Of Healing

It was said by Ernest Hemingway that, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn … it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that.” In Ernest Hemingway, A Reconsideration, Philip Young qualifies Hemingway’s quote. “This rather loose overstatement is generally taken to mean that Huckleberry Finn is the source for the natural, colloquial, and nonliterary prose style in which most modern American Literature, and particularly Hemingway’s is written.

Mark Twain who was disillusioned by the disappearance of the American Frontier, found life closing in on him all around found Huck Finn. Huckleberry found the big muddy and his raft. Every time his world closed in on him, a push of the raft found he and Jim in a fast moving river with trouble far behind them. Our hero never grows past young adulthood and at the crucial growth time he introduces Tom Sawyer.

Hemingway embellishes upon the Huckleberry character by creating his early Nick Adams and his difficulties at The Big Two Hearted River. Nick’s struggle to cross the river is generally attributed to Hemingway’s attempt to heal from his wounds received July 8, 1918 at Fossalta di Piave. Hemingway was wounded badly and for a time assumed to be beyond hope. It is said 277 pieces of shrapnel were removed from him. Psychologically, Nick almost doesn’t make it across the river. Through Nick and The Big Two Hearted River, Hemingway confronts his demon and seemingly keeps it at bay.

Writing is a form of healing, and history is full artists desperately trying. Living is hard, you have to try and survive. In your struggle, if it becomes too difficult, you can Just Open A Vein,like a quote by Red Smith in a book edited by William Brohaugh. Albert Bianchine

Resistance To Writing

I’m reminded of a scene in some B grade sci-fi movie that I have watched somewhere along the way. A creep of an alien is yelling at some human.

“It is futile to resist silly human!”

I am and have been resisting. Oh yes, I have the anchor out and have pulled the sails down on my little writing ship and blog. It is amazing to me that I would elect to neglect the only vehicle that I currently have up and running at my disposal.

It hasn’t always been that way. When I was living in Vail and working as a waiter, I became involved in reading books to children in the Library. I even went as far as starting a Vail Writing Group where none had previously existed. Motivated, to say the least, and eager to do anything to be involved with other writers. What happened to that spirit? I called myself a struggling writer and poet then. I was working on Of Mountains and Men that I published in August, 2009. I went to local Café’s and read my poems trying them out on others while learning to perform. It was great fun and I met many interesting people. So the question still is; What happened to change all that?

Was it my ranch, the horses, the goats, my job? It would be easy to blame those things. I could conjure up a million excuses why I stopped writing and performing, but that would be just what they were. Excuses lacking action! “Anything lacking action is doomed to failure, silly human.” It doesn’t take an alien in a space ship to get it. If I didn’t go to the library and sit in one of those great curvy chairs that lets you type on a typewriter (yes I am that old that I started writing before laptops) I wouldn’t have had enough material to edit into the shape of a book, let alone publish it.

Let’s go back further. If I didn’t go to Universities as a young man and take poetry writing workshops and write about what the Professors asked me to write about, I wouldn’t have had the raw poems to even think about editing.

Ok, so by now you are waiting on the point. The point is, have you met me? Have you read my blog lately? The resistance to good blogging on the suggestion of my wife by wanting to write stiff, stuffy, upper lipped fiction leaps off the page at you. Perhaps one should read what they are writing more often and learn from their mistakes.