Personal Time Machines

Here’s a modified text of the latest video, just in case you prefer to read.

Do you have a time machine? I’ll bet you have a lot of them. One of mine is the engine from the vintage 1951 Lionel train my parents got me when I was around a year and a half old. Of course, it wasn’t vintage when they gave it to me. It was brand new.  It still works, and I set it up every year at Christmas. It always reminds me of setting up the train and the tree with my father. One sniff of the engine oil does the trick. Years ago that aroma sailed up my nose and lodged in my brain right beside Necco Wafers and Vicks Vapo Rub.

Understand, this is a personal time machine just for me. It wouldn’t work for you, but don’t worry. If you have a saver in the family, you have your own. A time machine is any personal item that has story energy attached to it. Connect with your time machines in order to connect with your memories and, in turn, your stories. Whether it’s working with me to collect your stories and photographs in your private printing, or a project of your own. Time machines work.

Another of my time machines is from a few years later. My 35 mm Nikon F camera takes me back to 1970 in Japanwhere I bought it. I don’t remember the city, whether it was Saseboor Yokosuka, but I remember the store. I was watching a clerk as I was browsing. A customer walked up to the counter and the clerk smiled and said “Hi.” When it was my turn, I learned that he was saying hai, which means yes in Japanese. I didn’t speak Japanese and he didn’t speak English, but somehow I managed to buy the camera, one of the better results of my years in the Navy.

Sounds are good memory triggers, too. That camera has a mechanical shutter that makes a healthy ker-chunk when I shoot. Compared to my iPhone, the wimpy noise of its dinky digital “shutter” sounds like someone stepping on a cricket.

Speaking of cameras, here’s a surprise: photographs don’t always work as time machines. Often they’re attached only to the event they commemorate and nothing else. Black-and-white snapshots are something else that remind me of my father. When he looked at one, the first thing he did was turn it over, look at the back, and most times grumble “No date.” He was big on knowing who was who and when.

So connect with your time machines. Look at them. Hold them. Listen to them. Smell them if you want to. And then relax and see where they take you.

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View the video here at the website.

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The Unspoken Contract

Have you been watching The Firm? It’s the TV version of the John Grisham novel set ten years after the movie version that starred Tom Cruise. It’s on NBC and it isn’t bad as TV shows go. They’re interestingly structured stories, with each episode containing a continuing through-line as well as a stand-alone story. But they dropped the ball last week.

A cardinal rule of fiction is that nothing can happen that would yank the reader/ viewer out of the story. No anachronisms, no factual errors, and certainly nothing boneheadedly stupid. Oh well…

Here’s what happened. (Don’t worry; no spoilers.) The brother of the main character, a private investigator working for his lawyer brother, finds a piece of paper that had been run through a cross-cut shredder. You know– the kind that doesn’t cut the document into long strips. Not confetti, just shorter strips. He says that he’s good at puzzles and will put it back together. Between him and his girlfriend, they reassemble the entire document and tape it together.

Guess what: They didn’t need to.

There were four names taking up four lines in the upper left corner of the printout, which probably amounted to two square inches of space. The rest of the paper was completely blank. Why the hell did they take the time to reassemble the whole thing when putting together just the names would have taken no more than two or three minutes?

From a storytelling standpoint, there was a structural need to draw out the time between when they found the shredded printout and when they found the four names. Otherwise, the clue would have arrived too early and that story arc would have ended too soon. But the writers (there were two credited for this episode) needed to find a better way to accomplish that, and, sadly, they didn’t. Bonehead move. I actually felt sorry for the actors because the writers made them look like fools. But ultimately, it was the writers who looked foolish.

If you’re watching a story on screen or reading one in a book and something happens that makes you think about the writer, said writer has broken the slender thread that suspends your disbelief. That’s like breaking a contract, and you, the reader/viewer,  have every right to be upset. You’ve invested your time and (probably) money in this story, and you deserve a good return on your investment.

The relationship between writer and reader has long been described as an unspoken contract. The writer agrees to lie to the reader and the reader agrees to believe it. You see, the reader knows intellectually that what’s on the page never actually happened. It’s the writer’s job to keep that disbelief suspended by not doing something to make the characters look like idiots and pull the reader out of the story. What’s the word? Oh, yeah–

Bonehead.

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