Notes from Maine - 2024/07/21

We’ve had another busy week here. Seems like yesterday that I was writing about Earl’s fever and kitchen cabinets. Those two things make up at least 90% of what I’ve been busy with for the past seven days.

Earl (big Shire horse) has mostly returned to normal. His foot is less sore and his temperature has gone down. He has eaten ten days worth of antibiotics. Twenty more to go. In the kitchen, I’ve been seriously tempted to start working on drawers and shelves. With those in place, I could start to unpack the boxes in the dining room and finally put stuff away. But I would rather finish the base for the island and the sideboard first. With those done, I can engage with the countertop people and get them started. I have a temporary counter around the sink, but the rest of the cabinets are naked. I have a decent spatial imagination, but I really want to get the outside perimeter of cabinets locked down before I make my final decision about the size of the island. I need to be able to walk around it in order to imagine how close it should be to the wall and other counters. My drawings only reveal so much.

Down in Virginia, Mom was sick this week. She sounded terrible (sorry, Mom, but you know it’s true). My sister took her to the urgent care yesterday and it’s just a virus—nothing serious and it hasn’t taken hold in her lungs. All great news. In a couple of weeks, she’ll be coming up to the clean Maine air and we’ll get her back on track. She probably just needs to inhale fumes for a couple of weeks while she repaints everything that she painted back in June. 

I was watching a movie the other day and it occurred to me that I’m really bad at writing stupid, irrational characters. I’m not trying to suggest that I’m the most intelligent, rational person who has ever lived and therefore I can’t lower myself to conjure up something less. It’s just that I’m always trying to figure out what the internal logic of a character is, even when it’s a logic based on a failure to execute basic factual arithmetic. It’s funny—I can’t even write clearly about my failure to write about these characters clearly. 

Maybe I can come up with an example.

The bad guy is holding a knife to the young person’s neck and the mother says, “We did everything you asked us to do, now, please, let them go!”

Then the bad guy says, “Nah,” and the worst happens.

Why did the bad guy make that decision? Maybe mortally wounding the young person creates chaos so the bad guy can get away? Maybe the bad guy enjoys seeing the pain of others? Maybe the bad guy has to hurt someone weak so they can feel powerful themselves? Maybe they’re settling the score of an old grudge?

There are a million reasons we could use to justify a seemingly random, illogical act, but what if it’s simply random and illogical? Wouldn’t the scariest possible reason be no reason at all? You can’t plan or protect yourself from chaos. There’s no way to foresee it and you can’t change its outcome.

Maybe I have trouble writing those characters because I really don’t enjoy stories that have characters like that. There was a show I watched last winter called “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.” It was fine—good, even—but it had one recurring fault. As groups of people got involved in the story, they would often turn to each other and ask, “Are you sure you want to do this? Why do you care enough to risk your life?” or something similar. Each character had an opportunity to state their motivation. Then, a few scenes later, that person might turn to yet another character and ask nearly the same question of someone new. I can imagine that question comes up in a writer’s room often, but someone should have made note of how often the question crept into the dialog. There were plenty of flashbacks where they laid out the backstory. They should have trusted the audience to go along with things. Sometimes the characters have to risk their lives. It’s what drives thrillers forward. If the characters are questioning each other, then the audience is bound to blink, shake their heads, and start to question everything as well.

Later today I’ll be rushing around trying to finish some cabinet detail and I’ll think about own logic and motivation. In August, guests come in waves. The more functional the house is, the easier it is to live here. But in the end, nobody will care, I’m sure.