Life Lessons from LEGO

While visiting Target the other day, I always make an effort to swing by the Lego isle. I took a look at the newest Star Wars stuff, because Star Wars Lego sets were my favorite when I was growing up. This time I noticed the price tag on some of these things. The small sets start at twenty dollars, while the bigger stuff can get as high as seventy to one hundred U.S. dollars. I was floored.

Begone, vile temptress!

When I was a bright-eyed preteen, the sets seemed cheaper. The price of oil (and thus plastic) has gone up, so lets blame it on that. Anyway, I thought to myself, "I owned virtually every Star Wars set that Lego produced from '99 to '01 (minus the Slave 1 and Millenium Falcon, sigh). I could probably dig up the bricks and instructions and build this crap without spending a dime!"

And now it costs $3,100 on Amazon.

The reason I was working so hard to rationalize this to myself just then was because I was very tempted to pick up another X-Wing. They look REALLY good, and Lego has only gotten better at presenting the product on the box. If I were eleven, my wallet wouldn't've stood a chance. Thankfully I've gotten older and more stingy with my money. Just a little.

So I went home. Four days later, I took the plunge and dug out my stuff. Funny enough, my experience building this one little model gave me oodles of life lessons, morals and sage advice to hand out in the form of this blog. Heyo!

I have a lot of Legos. When we changed houses in 2001, most of my stuff was broken down and chucked into random boxes, bits flying at random. I seem to recall piecing everything back together, but it was never the same at this house. I pulled together everything I could from three different drawers in my closet and I still didn't have everything I needed. However, I DID find a thin stack of assembly instructions for some of my favorite models, including the Rock Raiders stuff that I adored. I found the A-Wing guide, but I didn't see more than five red bricks in the drawers, so that was out. I have no idea where my Y-Wing stuff went, so that's out. No X-Wing, no TIE, so it had to be the Snow Speeder.

Life lesson: The things you adore when you're eleven are not the same things you adore in your twenties. Lets see how I feel about video games when I'm forty.

There weren't only Legos on the drawers; there were some old Star Wars action figures, loads of rock-hard modeling clay, a shattered egg shell (my brother or someone owned an old Ostrich egg that didn't survive), and other bits and bobs that make their way into drawers. Before long I pulled out a trash can and threw away things as I went. Hmm.

Life lesson: I'm much more tidy than I was. I can't stand to see such gross disorganization in what's supposed to be a functional drawer. What's worse is some of the stuff is my brother's, which means it can't be thrown away easily (or can it?).

Construction began.

I didn't have all of the parts. I had enough to start a base, but it wasn't close to enough. Before long, I was pulling apart the part of the TIE that had survived and cannibalizing it for parts. Eleven-year-old William would NEVER do such a thing. Before long I had to pull a thirty-gallon tub of bricks from my little brothers' room to get enough. Sorting through that crap took forever. So I dumped it on the floor.

It hurts the knees after a time.

...And there was quite a mess. I was able to pick through the pile like a junkyard hobo, but it was slow going. Before long I realized I didn't have the patience to get the exact color of part, so I started going for Shape Only (and even that was pretty loosely followed). Thanks to both my experience with Legos and my inner crotchety old man, I don't tend to care when pieces don't match the instructions as long as everything fits together.

Life lesson: I'm not as particular as I used to be. I guess that not giving a crap about finicky little things comes with age.

The ship came together in about two hours. It's probably the longest assembly I've ever had in my life, simply because each part was a new journey to the junk heap. I almost gave up a few times but the end result was worth it; a slightly hodge-podge Snow Speeder with asymmetrical colored parts. In fact, I kind of prefer it this way. I've done enough creative writing to quickly justify the color scheme with a story about two Rebel fighters going down behind enemy lines and having to repair their ship with random scrap. I'd read that graphic novel.

Life lesson: The pursuit of perfection is fine when you have the time and inclination. Sometimes doing a lesser job is acceptable if you're happy with it. I'm not worried about other people's opinions of this one Lego thing. It's not a big thing in my life and it pleases me.

You Want What You Can't Have

After watching the Hulu preview of NBC's Revolution, I was struck by something. No, not the fact that Revolution was only "okay" by TV pilot standards, but by a change in the psychology of culture, at least when it comes to science fiction.



Around the year 1900, the most exciting prospects of sci-fi were things like going to other planets and meeting aliens or using fanciful computer-like devices for day-to-day tasks. Jules Verne explored the farthest reaches of Earth itself, going to its very center and exploring its vast oceans (about 20,000 leagues down).

Of course, these days we still have such stories. Going to other planets is "old hat," and in any sci-fi movie like Riddick or Prometheus you can see some very sharp special effects depicting computers and space travel technology. We're (mostly) living in the future that writers from the turn of the last century predicted, albeit a much less glamorous one with many fewer spaceships. As some statisticians would tell you, we have more people living in urban areas than in the countryside these days, and so the imagination of modern culture itself has shifted somewhat to reflect that.

In other words, one-hundred years ago, people who lived in the country loved stories about technology. These days, while surrounded by technology, we dream of a time without it. We've seen a dramatic rise in the interest in zombies in popular culture. There are all manner of zombie games across every entertainment medium. There are movies, books and songs about them. This fascination isn't just with the idea of dead humans coming back to life: It's about changing the status quo. The apocalypse gives meaning to the lives of people who feel unfulfilled in their normal lives. There's a romanticized purity about growing your own food and making your own clothes, something that most people in first-world countries haven't and won't ever do in their lives. It's only interesting because it's something new to most people. It's the newness and unfamiliarity that makes it enticing. Never mind the harsher realities of starvation, sickness and fear that that kind of world entails.

The Importance of Hindsight

Rereading your old writing is a great way to see where you've come from. I recently found an old piece of writing called Kitty Ridgeland, a sequel to a terrible story I wrote around 2009 called the Bottomless Bag. In that story, I took the idea of the Bag of Holding from Dungeons and Dragons and put a whole universe into it. Two kids from our universe found their way inside and adventures ensued. One of the things they found was a deposed queen named Kitridge (sigh) whose experiments with staying young had left her aging younger and younger. She'd managed to stop aging around the age of fourteen. As you might imagine, at that age it would be very difficult to be taken seriously, so she left her homeworld and returned with the boys to Earth.


Here's the first important takeaway of learning from your past mistakes: Never assume that anything you've done is amazing or awesome. Even some published authors have terrible habits (or no skill at all). The moment you assume you've become the perfect writer is the moment you stop improving. Conversely, believing everything you've done is complete crap can be just as harmful, as you'll probably just stop writing out of frustation. Even with the awful writings of my twenty-year-old self to look over, I can see the kernel of an interesting idea. One day I might go back and write a short treatment of the Bottomless Bag and actually do a good job this time.


Anyway, the sequel followed the day and the life of queen Kitridge (renamed Kitty to fit in better, ugh) as she found her way in high school (double ugh). Originally I wanted her to exude the qualities of a deposed old queen; she was all bitterness and spite, and this came through in the way she treated other students. To put it bluntly, she was a cold hard bitch. I'm really not interested in reading stories like this anymore; maybe it's because I don't find the idea of difficult people fun like I used to. I'm not who I was when I was nineteen.

She had all of these weird magic skills. But then again, so did everyone else in the school. I was going for this strange Harry Potter-like world where magic was commonplace. Eventually, Kitty got in a (quite violent) fight with another one of the girls at school. There was a fun fight scene (posted below) and then things go very wrong for the girls when their magic sort of runs away with them, leaving them in a time-stuck world. I only got about seven or eight pages in before I ran out of ideas. This might've been because I was tired from forcing the Bottomless Bag story or because the universe wasn't as interesting to me as it had been. Either way, the story is left hanging. After reading it, I realized several things, and wrote them down in the text document immediately afterward. Here's exactly what I wrote:

As I reread through this long-forgotten story, several things surprised me. Kitty's character is quite strongly defined, but there are a few things I'd change:

1: She's kind of a bitch, and I don't enjoy reading stories about terrible people. I need to make her more sympathetic. She doesn't need to become some patron saint, but I can find the line between Nurse Ratchet and Snow White.

2: Although I was once extremely fascinated with fantasy stories, I now find them to be rather overdone. I think I'll change the story to science fiction instead. Instead of being from the previous story (which I'm removing any reference to), she can be a time traveler, an alien or something else I haven't thought of yet.

3: I'm not exactly sure what happens next, but it intrigues me. I vaguely recall the thought of having some kind of agency that exists in the moment between moments, but that seems contrived. Also, the little robot/alien boy who caused the accident seems interesting.

4: Instead of editing this story, it might be easier if I simply rewrote it completely.

5: The whole thing with Kitty being mean to that other girl simply has to go. There's no motivation for a person to be so cruel for no reason. Either give Kitty a reason to dislike the other girl or do something else.

6: How about we rename Kitty? I don't care for that name (thanks to That 70's show and Arrested Development).

There's lots here for me to work with, and it's interesting to see where I was in 2009. I hadn't even read Self Editing for Writers yet. Reading this old story lets me see the soul of my style. Despite the poor word choices and storytelling faux pas, I can see a story I was enthusiastic about. Now I know how to fix it and make better decisions in the way I tell this story. Hopefully in three years I'll look back at that and see that I've improved.

The fight scene between Kitty and Sarah:

Kitty experienced an explosion of white light as Sarah's fist collided with her right eye. Kitty grabbed Sarah by her hair and punched her in the neck. Sarah wheezed and clasped her throat, dropping to her knees. Before Kitty had time to wonder if she had really hurt her, she found herself knocked to the ground by a spell. She got to her feet just in time to see a cloud of X-acto blades emerge from the supply cabinet in the corner of the room and gather in a cloud over Sarah's head. Sarah was on her feet again and was crouching on the ground, holding both arms forward, as if she were directing the way for the blades to fly. Kitty ducked almost too late; the blades whipped over her head and cut several long grooves in her scalp before sticking in the wall behind her. Blood flowed in torrents down her face.

Kitty pushed back as hard as she could; there were suddenly so many spells in her head that she didn't bother sorting them out. She hurled lightning and wind along with Mr. Cropton's office chair at Sarah, who deflected them easily, retaliating with a wall of water and a volley of sharpened pencils, some of which stuck painfully into Kitty's face, arms and legs.

Now she was angry. She dodged around another group of spells and charged at Sarah, intending to punch and kick any part of her that she could get a hold of. Her plan failed when Sarah sent a solid wall of air that slammed into Kitty like a mattress and sent her toppling over backwards. She landed on her stomach, slightly dazed. For the first time in Kitty's life, the thought crossed her mind that she might not win.