Writing on Writing, Blindness, Pop Culture, Science, Meaning, and Story
Author: Chrys Buckley
Chrys Buckley was born with albinism, which means she has no pigment and she’s legally blind. Chrys has bachelor’s degrees in Arts & Letters, Micro/Molecular Biology, and Biochemistry. She endured approximately ¾ of medical school before breaking free to focus on writing and disability advocacy. She’s currently in the Book Publishing graduate program at Portland State University, pursuing concentrations in Book Editing and Book Design. Chrys is the manager of the Digital and Audio departments at Ooligan Press. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Sun, Shark Reef, and Aerial. She was a finalist (twice) in MTV’s “I’m from Rolling Stone” writing contest. She has won the R.L. Gilette Scholarship and the Sophie Kerr Gift in English Literature. Her debut collection Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays is forthcoming from Wandering Aengus Press. Chrys lives, works, walks, and writes in Portland.
As I’m sure is glaringly obvious, I watch a lot of TV. But somehow, despite all the time I spend watching Netflix, it’s almost always TV episodes. I don’t make as much time for movies as I used to. And even when I used to watch move movies, it always seemed there were so many good ones I hadn’t seen for any number of reasons.
I want to do more screenwriting, and as with any form of writing, getting better at it means immersing yourself in that form and medium of storytelling. Or I’m just giving myself an excuse to start getting DVDs in the mail from Netflix again (the streaming movie selections are a bit limited) and spend more time watching movies. Either way, I would love some suggestions.
So give me your top five to ten movies (or more!) you think I should see. They can be your favorites, or great examples of a particular genre, or even movies you hate (as a writer, it can be good to familiarize yourself with the not-so-great examples too, and who knows, tastes differ. Or you can have no particular theme or reason at all. Just give me some suggestions, and some descriptions of why if you want, and I’ll start compiling an epic film educational queue.
I’m not saying much about what movies I already love (or hate) b/c I want to be open to all suggestions, but if you’re really curious, I have a faves list on my FB. But since I’m looking to branch out, I just don’t want to limit anything to similar titles or anything like that. Really, all suggestions welcome!
For anyone who writes stories, makes music or does any sort of creative art, this has to be one of the most common questions you are asked, and one of the most common questions you want to ask others.
Dreaming
It’s a mysterious thing. I think so many people are curious about it, even people who themselves are involved in the creative arts, because it’s not always concrete and logical (those aspects do come into play, of course). Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly where that first seed or flash or image or idea originated.
Sometimes you know. The idea for Total Eclipse of the Heart, which I wrote originally as a short story and am now having fun working into a screenplay, came to me pretty much fully-formed in a dream, including some of the dialogue. Actually in the dream I was taking a screenwriting class (which at that point in time I had never done in real life) and struggling with writers block, then came up with this idea for the story and in the dream I was reworking it and molding it. There were so many details, so many subplots and so much complexity for a story that came from a dream.
That has never happened before or since but it was pretty cool when it did. It kinda made me feel like I had to write the story.
And faces—nothing has given me more trouble. Eyes, those most important details of a face, are too small to make out unless I am close enough to make out with someone. I didn’t know what color my last boyfriend’s eyes were until after we had been dating for almost six months. Whenever we were close enough for me to discern their color, he kept his eyes closed. I didn’t see his eyes until we were riding a city bus on our way to a concert on an early May evening, squished next to each other on the seats. He turned slightly to me, the light was just right, and I finally saw out of my right eye that his left was brown with textured traces of gold, simultaneously soft and hard in color.
Last year, I was watching TV on my 24-inch computer monitor, sitting less than a foot away, and saw a close-up of someone rolling her eyes. At thirty, I was seeing that gesture for the first time and it was nothing like I had imagined. Inspired, I wanted to get a glimmer of what it is to read feelings in eyes, so I watched Grey’s Anatomy, scrutinizing characters during emotionally wrought scenes, their faces taking up my whole screen. Though I felt all the feelings from the context, the music, the minute changes in pitch and inflection in their voices and the larger facial gestures, I could see nothing in the eyes.
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This is an excerpt from an essay in which I explore a few different aspects of albinism and blindness.
Okay, I HAVE to start with this one because it’s just too cool. Someone made all these Breaking Bad scenes out of Legos. Most of them focus on the dearly departed meth superlab, but the RV is also there. There’s Walt and Jesse in their meth-making cook suits, Gus holding a chicken thing, Walt Jr. on his crutches, and even (my favorite of the people), the creepy-ass Salamanca Cousins complete with an ax. It would be cool if they added a Skyler, Hank and Marie. And of course Tio.
All of the pictures are slightly, wonderfully disturbing and I just can’t get over how freakin’ cool it is. And how detailed. Like Breaking Bad itself.
I belong to a lot of mailing lists for blind and visually-impaired members, including blind students, blind people interested in science and engineering, the blind of Oregon, the blind of Portland, and so forth.
One thing that comes up over and over again on these lists, especially the student and science ones, is difficulty with science labs. Maybe a student needs a year of a lab science for their general education requirements. Maybe someone wants to go into science but doesn’t know how to handle labs. Maybe the students know they can find ways to do the labs but the professors or the schools don’t.
It can be really intimidating so I thought I’d take some time to write about this here. I also think a lot of sighted people, once they see or hear about a blind person doing science labs, want to know how it’s done but might not feel comfortable asking. So this is for blind and sighted alike.
It all started with a duffel bag. There was this really awesome Breaking Bad duffel bag on eBay that I was looking at. After the auction ended, I went looking for it elsewhere, googling, and accidentally came across the script for episode 301 “No Mas,” in which Walt and Hank have an exchange about Walt’s duffel bag filled with drug money. It soon became clear that reading the script was way more valuable than some duffel bag so I started googling and looking for more scripts. One kept popping up in all my searches, a script for Season 5, Episode 1, titled “Truckers Deluxe.” Some sites labeled the script as fake, others seemed to claim it was real.
Now, I’m usually a spoiler-free kinda girl. You might even call me a purist, with slightly limited willpower. I want to experience the story the way it’s written to be experienced, not know it ahead of time. I remember a few years ago, it was announced that there would be a wedding on the season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy, and a bunch of people wrote all over the Facebook page about which couple it would be, with no spoiler alerts, and I was pissed! For that reason, this year when it was announced that someone would die on the season finale, I stayed far away from the Grey’s FB page. Anyway, the point is, I try to avoid spoilers.
But this was Breaking Bad and I am more addicted to that show than the methheads on the show are to their blue crystal. So I couldn’t help myself. Plus it was probably fake anyway, right?
The first few days of convention are filled with Division meetings, meaning that instead of meeting as a huge assembly (that will come later), at any given time there are several different special interest groups meeting at once. Parents of blind children, blind parents, seniors, diabetics, piano tuners, ham radio operators, lawyers, antique car enthusiasts, crafters, technology buffs, they all have divisions and meetings. There are also meetings for new members, presentations from different schools for the blind, presentations by guide dog schools where you can “test drive” a guide dog, meetings on how to build up local chapters, demos of new adaptive technology, plays put on where the directors and actors are all blind, salsa dance classes taught, attended and deejayed by blind folks, a mock trial put on by blind lawyers and the list goes on. We take frequent breaks in our room because the stories are true, it is a little overwhelming.
There’s also the Independence Market, a technology and adaptive aid exhibit hall in one of the hotel ballrooms and it is something to behold. Along every inch of every wall, and through several makeshift hallways in the center, there are endless tables and displays, each draped in a different company logo. Most of the booths feature technology items—braille notetakers, digital book readers, screen-reading software packages, handheld iPhone-shaped gadgets that act as magnifiers and also play music and videos. Apple is there with the real iPhones, which are accessible right out of the box, the new technology rage among the blind. There are several flavors of talking medical supplies, every size and shape of magnifier and audible GPS devices. There are random non-techie booths, like the FBI doing job recruiting, and a booth selling Braille Bibles brailled in over 27 languages, including several Indian ones like Hindi and Malayalam.
I go by myself to the science and engineering division meeting, where I meet people who are interning for NASA and a totally blind girl who’s majoring in biochemistry who guesses people’s heights (while they are sitting down) by voice. Even though I’m slightly slouching, she guesses my 5’7” spot on. The NASA thing gets me. When I was younger, I thought I wanted to do something like that when I grew up, but back then my visual impairment would have been a deal-breaker. That’s one of the great things about a convention like this: you get to really see that things are changing, that blind people are making inroads and finding success in all kinds of careers and hobbies.
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This is an excerpt from the essay “Blind Conventions,” a recounting of my first experience at a blind convention held by the NFB. This piece is apropos because I’m currently en route to my 2nd NFB convention. I’m sure there will be lots of fun crazy, funny, weird and inspiring stories that I’ll be tweeting along the way! These conventions are always surreal.
Last week, I wrote about Breaking Bad and endings in this post, and today I’m going to look at another show’s season ending, and discuss some writerly things about endings in general, particularly for crime writing.
Spoiler Alert: If you aren’t caught up and don’t know who did it, go get caught up…then come back.
Sunday, June 17th was the big Season 2 finale of AMC’sThe Killing. Like with Breaking Bad, I came to The Killing late in the game and just started watching it this year. There are a lot of things I really like about this show, most notably atmosphere.
Apparently one alternate enough that I am actually watching Dawson’s Creek. I never watched it when it was on, even though I was right around that age. It just never appealed to me. I wasn’t watching much TV then and when I did it was pretty much just The X-Files. But then after the end of the past school year, I was just looking for some TV to relax to, something to help me unwind from the insane intensity of the last year, something that wouldn’t really make me think, and a friend suggested Dawson’s Creek.
During the spring of my freshman year of college, I stayed up late a lot, usually on really rainy nights it seemed, and talked to people on IRC chats who I knew through a music forum. I was on the east coast so even though it was really late for me, after all kinds of other activities, it wasn’t as late for people in other time zones. We talked about music, books and movies, music, our lives, music, the meaning of life, the future of the universe, and more music.
Around this same time, I really got into Counting Crows. I had never paid them all that much attention to them in the “Mr. Jones” heyday but a college friend lent me “August and Everything After” and “This Desert Life” and I was instantly enamored. There are so many great songs on those albums.
Chrys Buckley 