Study

June 25th, 2008Blog0 comments

I spend as much time dissecting and analyzing other peoples’ work as I do writing. I’ve always been into taking things apart and figuring out how they tick. This started with the Commodore 64 I had when I was a kid. It wasn’t enough to play the games — I loved examining their code to see how they worked.

This was back in the day when computer magazines came with programs printed in them that you typed in manually and ran. Kind of like a super-analog Usenet — the method of downloading was typing.

I used to spend hours typing in programs, running them, then modifying the code to see what would happen. I would write new code to add features or adjust existing features. For instance, I added joystick support for a version of C64 PONG that used the keyboard.

So I spend a lot of time these days reading stuff, breaking it down on paper, and turning it around in my head. I’m currently reading the plays of Sarah Ruhl — they’re funny with a sense of clarity and emotional punch that I love. I’m also re-reading Stephen Adly Guirguis’s plays because they’re awesome. I just re-read Paul Auster’s Timbuktu and am currently re-reading McCarthy’s The Road, and I have to sit down sometime soon and reverse engineer the outline for Juno.

I think storytelling is about re-imagining the everything that we have personally experienced — taking bits and pieces from the world around us and fusing them together into something new. It’s good to see what’s out there and understand how people do what they do. I’m like a friendly, very curious Borg. I use my nanoprobes to assimilate hamburgers and knowledge.