I'm watching Heroes on TV and cringing. I want to grab the writer by the collar and shake him, all the time saying, "C'mon! People don't think like that! People don't talk like that!"

Welcome to The Elsewhere, my place to pontificate about the curse of writing. "What?" you ask. "Isn't it supposed to be 'The Art of Writing'?"

Artists are cursed. Haunted. Obsessed. Writing is our exorcism. We fear our stories. We fear being pushed beyond our comfort by them. We fear failing them, not doing them justice. We fear mistranslating them, so what we say is different from what we mean to say.

I think, as an amateur author, I am no smarter, no more creative, no more imaginative than anyone else. I am simply one who has pushed through that thin barrier of, "Oh, no. I can't write this down. People'll laugh."

Overcome this, and you, too, will be doomed to be an author. Once you realize the stories are in us all, and that simple thought is all that cages them in, you are one step closer. Write down the words, "What if..." and finish the sentence, and you're an author.

Oh, I forgot to tell you. It sucks to be an author. Now you're a slave to perfection, your body a lowly scribe to some aetheral part of your psyche. Even worse, it changes how you interact with the rest of the world.

Stories of your youth becomes character studies, plot dissections, and thematic fodder. No longer can you just "escape" into a story, even one that was once your favourite. Instead, the "black box" of your brain constantly is sampling what you read, evaluating it, looking for flaws, quantifying strengths.

No longer can you relax in the alternate world that other author crafted. The seams, wires and mirrors become p(l)ain and visible. I suppose this is how amateur stage magicians feel when they attend kiddie birthday parties (their kids, their kids' friends, their friends' kids, whatever.)

Most of the time, the magic just isn't there anymore.

In opening ourselves to the possibility of working magic in others' eyes, we lose the vision of magic in our eyes.

So it is with television. I watched an episode of Lost, then skipped a few and watched another. I'm of the mind that J.J.Abrams is practising the "throw as much as you can think of against the wall and see what sticks" method of writing.

I've run tabletop roleplaying games with that method. It works fine. With sufficent opened-ness at the beginning, enough odd hooks throughout, enough review and brainstorming during the midstory, you can end up with some mindblowing climax that seems like you planned it all from the start.

As gamemaster, I always felt it would be false of me to claim, "I planned it this way all along." In truth, I pruned back plotlines as the players showed disinterest and built up the remainder to further their affinity to the story. This is fine for "interactive fiction" and for "poor person's authoring system," both phrases I've used to describe tabletop roleplaying.

I expect more from "the pros."

Same with Heroes. I'll talk generics, so as not to spoil any fellow viewers.

They have people doing stupid things. We're not talking "stupid people doing stupid things."

We have people who are supposed to be geniuses, and they don't seem to realize that talking in public about paranormal abilities just won't get them the responce they desire.

We have people trying strange things in public that they can just as easily do in private.

We have people who are oblivious to the obvious, people who are not only facing the impossible, but have reason to believe they've done the impossible.

What we have here are lazy writers. We have authors who can't be arsed to come with a better way to get their characters from point A to point B, physically, emotionally, interaction-wise, or plot-wise.

It may not be plain to you. It might not have been plain to me either before I picked up my addiction to the black and white. It is plain now.

Welcome to The Elsewhere, where I can't just sit and enjoy any work of fiction anymore.