Category: Writing

Samples, Writing

What Color is Your Eight? – On Synesthesia 1

Chrys Buckley

The color of the number 8 is a purply violet-black but not a bright violet, more dull. It’s almost more of a vibration than a color. August is similar but darker, almost burnt and yet more radiant. The letters D and P are both green but D is pale sage while P is an intense forest green. Tuesday is a muted cerulean blue.

Regions thought to be cross-activated in graph...
Regions thought to be cross-activated in grapheme-color synesthesia

Synesthesia is a condition in which one sense evokes another, habitually and involuntarily. Some synesthetes sense different tastes with musical keys, feel “personalities” for different days of the week, or perceive months as having specific spatial locations (“November is two feet to the right”) but the most common form is color-grapheme synesthesia, where letters and numbers have immediate, unchanging color associations. This is the form of synesthesia I experience, as well as colors for months and days of the week that in some cases do, and in some don’t, relate to their letters or numbers.

In his bestselling Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Oliver Sacks explores synesthesia, musical and otherwise. He describes psychologist Patrick Ehlen’s early experience of saying aloud to his first-grade class that he was “counting the colors until Friday,” to which the class burst out laughing.

One day in third grade, my class was talking about colors and feelings. The teacher asked everyone what color we thought anger was and everyone said “red.” Of course it was. Vowels and first letters set the tone for the word and A is a rich, deep red. Then she asked us what color sad was, and the rest of the class said “blue” as I started to say “red.” Sad has that deep red A and the S, a duller shade of red. Most people thought of being sad as “having the blues,” but for me it was as deep a red as melancholy. It was the first time I remember being conscious that others didn’t see these colors.

~~~

This is an excerpt from “On Synesthesia,” a lyric essay I wrote about, you guessed it, synesthesia.

You can check out other Friday Samples here. And don’t forget you can always check out Published and Older Works for more samples.

~Chrys

Next Up: Legends, Fakers and Painterly Writers – On Synesthesia 2

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Who’s Your Literary Soul Mate?

Chrys Buckley

Have you ever thought about this? By soul mate, I’m not talking about which character from fiction you’d want to hook up with or have as your lover (that could be another post), but which character feels most like you? If you were to undergo some sort of weird science disaster and somehow morph from your real life into fiction, which character would you surface as? Is there someone you’ve read whose voice feels so close to your own, who thinks your thoughts?

The character doesn’t have to have the same gender as you, be around your age or have any of the same life accoutrements that you do, just a character who, when you read, you recognize in some inner place as almost you?

For me, it would have to be Astrid from White Oleander by Janet Fitch. Our lives are nothing alike, but the way Astrid sees the world, the way she expresses things in her inner monologues, just describes ways that I have thought and felt much better than I ever could. I have some of these passages bookmarked with post-it notes. Every few years, I go back and reread White Oleander and it’s always a trippy experience to read someone thinking some of my thoughts and feeling some of your feelings.

So, who’s your literary soul mate?

~Chrys

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Samples, Writing

Ocean Reverie

Chrys Buckley
Long Island Sound, Connecticut

I am obsessed with the sea. This river isn’t that, but it stretches out for eons. I gaze at the horizon, misty and distant. My parents grew up in Connecticut and I was born in a small town right outside of New Haven, only a five-minute drive from the shore. Long Island Sound, I think, shaped me more than I can remember. I have vague blurry childhood pictures of being at the beach when I was little, walking down a woodsy road with a yellow line in the middle and thick trees on the sides, until we reach a little wooden shack with stalls where we could change. In other still photos I see Mom showing me how to listen for the ocean in a conch shell, talking about seahorses during a sunset, walking along the shore combing for smooth rocks, shells or colored glass. My life was colored with the scent of saltwater until just before I turned six.

We were eating McDonald’s food for lunch the day Dad told us he got transferred. I still remember the taste of the salty fries in my five-year-old mouth after he told me and Randy, we’re moving. I didn’t think I much cared. We traveled often enough, all over New England, to Santa’s Village in New Hampshire and other amusement parks in Massachusetts and Vermont. My dad used to be a policeman, and oftentimes he had to work nights, but it seemed like we always had time for vacations. Then Dad decided to join the FBI and had to go to a place called Quantico for sixteen whole weeks. That McDonald’s lunch—a special treat reserved for special occasions—was so soon after his return. We moved to Buffalo at the end of that January, while Mom was newly pregnant with June.

And it’s true what they say sometimes in books and movies and in that old song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” done originally by Joni Mitchell, you really don’t know what you’ve got until after it’s gone. There is no way to calculate how much something means to you, especially when it’s something you always see, something you live with every day, like a nearby ocean and a nearby Nana. Those things creep up on you, so invisible and insidious until they’re a part of you that you can’t live without.

Continue reading “Ocean Reverie” →

Writing

Perils, Pitfalls and Pleasures of Writing Memoir

Chrys Buckley

Writing about your own life is like walking through murky water. On one hand, you are employing some of the techniques of fiction. Dialogue. Description. Setting. Character Development. Theme. Symbolism. Story arc and plot. Scene, scene, scene. Internal monologue. All of these come into play. And then there are the smaller, detail-oriented things like cadence, sentence variation, and playing with language in an artful way that expresses what you want to say.

And yet, it’s not fiction.  There are limits on all of the above elements (except perhaps the language and sentence levels). Your dialog has to match, more or less, the dialogue as you remember it from real life. Your character development is limited to how much you’ve developed your insights and observations about the people around you, how closely and in how many dimensions you’ve paid attention.

Your story arc often won’t fit the more linear traditional arc. That can be one of the trickier things to work with. I think you do need a fair amount of crafting to make the raw material of your life into a story worth telling. You can’t just vomit out exactly as you remember it happening because life is so messy that your story would end up that way too. At the same time, I think it’s dangerous to control the messiness too much, to work too hard to fit things into and expected and accepted story arc. Doing so can push you too far into fiction. There has to be a balance between free-flowing creative energy and craft. And the more you write, the more both come naturally.

More on writing memoir

Metaphysics, Samples, Writing

The Colors – Dark As Roses 1

Chrys Buckley

I look around the classroom and try not to see anyone. I should pay attention to the psychology book on my desk—after all, the midterm is on Friday and it’s now Monday—but the words blur and swim on the page. At the board, Dr. Crowley goes on, reviewing the abnormal cases. Pretty soon he’ll bring up synesthesia and I’ll melt into a puddle of mush on the floor and die. In the meantime, I suppose I’ll stare at the wall. I can’t look at my classmates, I’ll only see the colors. Won’t even be able to see the faces for all the haze brought on by midterm worry. I’m going mad, I know.

Dark Rose

I’ve always seen the colors around the people, even as a very small child. Most of the shrinks my mom dragged me to back then chalked it up to synesthesia, said there was some odd wiring in my brain that confused my senses and that’s why I saw colors. They always did remark though, that it’s a very focused case. Usually people with synesthesia hear sound when they see motion or associate colors with certain letters and numbers, whereas I only saw the colors on the people. My classmates used to tease me about being the crazy girl in town, after I made the grave mistake of talking about it. Frustrated teachers tried to educate them about my affliction, as they called it, about the wiring gone wrong in my brain. That only made them laugh until they were sick with giggles. They called me “Metalbrain.”

Now it’s my second year away at college and no one knows about my problem. I don’t want Dr. Crowley talking about my affliction in the class. I might concentrate too hard on the professor, or the floor, or this wall I’m staring at. I might nervously twirl my hair or fidget and then everyone will know my secret.

~~~

Today I decided to go with some fiction. “Dark As Roses” is a short story I wrote about a girl who struggles with psychic ability she’s not sure she wants to possess. These are the first few paragraphs.

You can check out other Friday Samples here. And don’t forget you can always check out Published and Older Works for more samples.

~Chrys

Next Excerpt: Psychedelic Strobe Lights – Dark As Roses 2

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Is Memoir Writing Self-Indulgent?

Chrys Buckley

WritingIt certainly feels that way at times. When I’m writing memoir, I’m my own main character, my life is the plot, my predilections become the theme, the story is from my perspective and all the characters’ voices are in some ways filtered through my own.

But on the other hand, memoir writing can be like a crucible. When you are writing memoir and really digging into it, it can be excruciating. Your embarrassing moments are laid bare. And so are your faults. You have to look at yourself in a real way, and it can be scary and really hard to do.

In fact, I know that’s held me back on my latest memoir project. I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to tell a particular story, tentatively titled A Case of You, but it has been hard to get started and keep going on the story because I know there are parts of myself that I’ll have to face that I’d rather not acknowledge at all. So many times I’ll start working on bits and pieces of the project, only to stop a few days later and leave it alone for months. Sometimes the thought of facing those darker parts of yourself can feel scarier than almost anything you could encounter in your external life. But memoir writing doesn’t let you get away with running away from it.

Continue reading “Is Memoir Writing Self-Indulgent?” →

Writing

TV Rich and Movie Poor

Chrys Buckley

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!

~Chrys

Writing

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Chrys Buckley

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.

Continue reading “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” →

Blindness and Disability, Samples, Writing

Reading Eyes and Faces – Seeing and Not Seeing 1

Chrys Buckley

eyeimagesAnd 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.

~~~

This is an excerpt from an essay in which I explore a few different aspects of albinism and blindness.

You can check out other Friday Samples here. And don’t forget you can always check out Published and Older Works for more samples.

~Chrys

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TV, Writing

That “Leaked” Breaking Bad Season 5 Premiere Script

Chrys Buckley

Has anyone else read it?

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.

Photo from the real Season 5 Premiere © AMC TV

You can read the supposedly leaked 501 “Truckers Deluxe” Script here

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?

Continue reading “That “Leaked” Breaking Bad Season 5 Premiere Script” →