Progressive Complications: "Sweet Blue Flowers" by Takako Shimura (Part 2)
The second part of my dive into Progressive Complications and the manga “Sweet Blue Flowers".”
Part Two: Chapter 2 - “Stand By Me”
Today I will continue the story breakdown (with a focus on progressive complications) of Sweet Blue Flowers by Takako Shimura. If you have not read the first part, you can find it here.
From last time:
At the end of Chapter 1 we are left with the following complications unresolved:
Complication #1: Why is Fumi prone to crying?
Complication #2: Will they join the same club? Will Fumi manage to avoid being in a club forever?
Complication #3: What’s up with this weird intimacy with Fumi and her cousin?
And, of course, the series Crisis question: Will Fumi and Akira end up together!?
In Chapter Two, we return again to Fumi and Akira - two childhood friends who were separated and went to different schools until! they both ended up at Matsuoka Girl's High School in year 1. Reunited, we join Akira and Fumi at a cafe after school. Akira insists, now that they have a connection again, they meet before and after school to travel together. Fumi’s mom invites Akira over for dinner and asks Fumi what her friend likes, which serves as a small aside for a childhood memory: Akira eats the food Fumi doesn’t want to. At school, it’s time for the Club push again and Fumi somehow manages to sidestep the drama club for the second time. Realizing she will eventually have to submit to joining, she notices a sign for Literature Club and realizes that might be the best escape. But as she opens the door, a tall and handsome Third Year student is on the other side! She compliments Fumi on her height and asks, “Do you want to join my club?” Swooned by this mysterious older student, and in a haze of attraction, Fumi immediately agrees (which both closes the loop on Complication #2, and begins Complication #4 and #5 in a brilliant meet-cute shift).
Later, at Fumi’s house for dinner, Fumi’s cousin and new fiance suddenly arrive. Fumi’s mom is surprised they made it, but happy to see them. But Fumi’s tone shifts from casually chatting about her chance encounter and joining Literature Club, to all the attention being showered on her cousin. This pushes Fumi to tears again saying: “Chizu (Fumi’s cousin)’s so mean!”
After dinner, Akira and Fumi are getting ready for bed. Fumi asks if Akira can sleep in the bigger bed with her and continue to comfort her after the emotional dinner (which we didn’t see). This is not played romantically, but as a friend needing someone close. But as Akira climbs into bed with Fumi, Fumi has a memory of a shadowed figure (implied to be Chizu, her cousin) asking “Is this alright?” and “Are you scared?” as she puts naked Fumi’s fingers in her mouth. “Fumi, you’re so cute,” the shadowed figure says. In current time again, Fumi begins to cry. This feeds into Complication #1 (why does Fumi cry?), but that may not be the whole answer yet. It also answers part of Complication #3 (What’s up with the intimacy between Fumi and her cousin?). Akira teases Fumi for crying in a way that makes her laugh and the scene ends with a voiceover from Fumi that says: “Night is for sleeping. But I won’t sleep tonight because I have so much to talk about,” which implies she will tell Akira about her cousin’s advances (but this is not clear by the end of Volume 1, from what I could tell).
Back at school the next day, Fumi goes to the Literature Club for the first time, but discovers the girl she is looking for isn’t there! What gives? Well, as it turns out, the girl is the leader of the Basketball Club, which Fumi is now a member of! (ending Complication #4 - she joined the wrong club! - and seeding Complication #5 - will she follow through to meet the girl?).
This ends Chapter 2, “Stand By Me.”
Let’s run through the story elements:
Chapter 1:
Inciting incident: Fumi and Akira reunite, but Akira doesn’t remember their childhood connection.
Complication #1: Fumi is prone to crying
Complication #2: Fumi is avoiding joining a club, but has to at some point
Complication #3: There’s something weird happening with Fumi and her Cousin
Turning Point Complication / Crisis: Will Akira remember Fumi, and when she does, will their connection be reignited?
Climax: Yes, she does remember her (with some help from her mom)
Resolution: The connection is back! Instant friends. Akira shows consideration for Fumi.
Chapter 2:
Inciting incident: Fumi gives in and joins the literature club! Akira visits Fumi at home.
Complication #4: Fumi joins the basketball club by mistake
Complication #5: Fumi meets a dashing Third Year lady while joining the club, who she is swooned by immediately, which she admits to Akira at dinner and askes “is it okay to admire a girl like that?” and Akira responds: “Why not! Girls are the only ones here.”
Complication #6: Is Akira open to a lesbian relationship at all?
Turning Point Complication / Crisis: While Akira is over for a dinner/sleep-over at Fumi’s house, Chizu (Fumi’s cousin) shows up with her new fiance and Fumi breaks down. Why is Fumi crying (Complication #1) and why now?
Climax: Fumi tells the audience (and maybe Akira) that she was taken advantage of by her cousin Chizu (implied not explicit) when she was younger - which was also possibly her first lesbian experience and has a lot of baggage.
Resolution: Akira and Fumi become closer.
The complications in this story feel earned and progressive. At every turn there is an escalation of emotional and character development that feels exactly right for the characters you are slowly getting inside the heads of. Takako manages to slowly seed these moments in chapters throughout Volume 1 by pushing characters together in natural, realistic encounters that feel pulled from the everyday experience of young friendships and romances. Hidden feelings and histories drive the characters towards each other and away again in the waves of casual life. Reading through Chapter One and Two a second time brought out more subtle shifts in character depiction. During my third reading, I found myself focused on the scenic panels without dialogue or characters and how they set the mood and break up actions.
Volume 1 of Sweet Blue Flowers is the first seven chapters (165 pages), and a really solid read. This set of articles was specifically about the story beats and the progressive complications and not a review of the wonderful style and emotional depiction of the characters. It was a real pleasure to read Takako’s work this week and I am eager to start volume 2 next week. Even Though We’re Adults Volume 2 will be out in June.
For more information about Story Grid, check out their official website.
Motivation vs. Productivity: The 2020 Story (non-fiction, writing)
My motivation and productivity are at odds. Two metrics, two modes, one tiny link. Motivation is connected to my state of inspiration, ideas, and workaholism. But productivity is more difficult. I like to get things done in an order that prioritizes important and well-meaning things over perhaps more personal tasks. If you were to go through all the notebooks in my apartment, and at my office desk, you would find stacks of half-finished bullet journals and very uneven plot outlines (scribbled randomly on a quarter page I cut from a discarded 11 x 17 show poster, which I never hung). Life comes in waves of productivity.
Often, I make plans to do work on the weekend – or maybe at the end of the day, after dinner. “Okay,” I tell myself, “there will be plenty of time on Friday to take this fresh motivation I have and mold it haphazardly into productivity.”
The weekend comes. Friday: I get my coffee and some breakfast. I sit down and get to frickin’ work. I have a list. I have paper and pens and notebooks, and the laptop is charged. The house is quiet. All I have to do is work. But nothing comes.
By the time motivation is supposed to meet productivity, there’s a kink in the chain and everything slows down. Twitter starts to look compelling. There are TV shows I want to check out. “For story structure,” I think, “it’s research.”
There will be a number of things in your way when you go to create. Some are external: the bills piling up, the construction work outside, the global pandemic, the month-long election process for the President of the United States. Some will be internal: self-doubt, worry, self-censorship, or insecurity. Painful resistance is obvious. But behavioral, systemic, and societal resistance hide behind other more obvious things.
Steven Pressfield, the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, writes about resistance in his book The War of Art. I’ve ordered it and it should be here this year, so maybe I’ll do a Books on Writing 101 after I’ve read it. Pressfield is big in the Story Grid community because he co-founded Black Irish books with Shawn Coyne and helped develop some of the Story Grid tools. In the community, Resistance is a concept you’ll hear about a lot.
The surface-level takeaway is this: You have to get out of the way and do the work. It’s impossible to write strong, inspired work if you’re preoccupied. I haven’t learned how to get out of my own way yet. I’ve focused on productivity tools and methods, I’ve tried to capture inspiration and turn it into future motivation, I’ve planned and outlined and abandoned projects to make space. But I haven’t gotten out of my own way enough, mentally, to do the work.
Sometimes when we focus on learning and craft, we get too in the weeds. In Robert McKee’s Story and in Story Grid, there’s an emphasis that most of what they’re trying to teach you should happen after the work is done. Don’t worry about Obligatory Scenes or The Negation of the Negation in your character arc yet. In the beginning, that’s all resistance. It feeds into productivity and motivation and slows down creativity.
If you have any tips on how to get out of my own way, I’d be happy to try them! But for now, I’m focusing on setting time, letting my mind relax, and not worrying about the structure or the changes. Just the work.
Shifting to Craft (Non-Fiction, Writing)
MOAB, Utah - 2019.
Before the outbreak of COVID-19, I was working on many different projects. We were covering the Portland International Film Festival right in the middle of the outbreak; I was working on three different writing projects in various stages of submission; and was trying to build some background ideas for sound art pieces, which was a newer interest. Productivity was high and the projects were exciting. It started to feel like things were getting done.
I tend to be a high producer - meaning I work on a lot of projects and get a lot of stuff done. This does not mean it is all quality. A lot of it isn’t. But with writing and new skills, it takes me a lot of practice and error to get something decent. But as long as things are moving, things are good.
But then everything stopped and, in Portland at least, we were faced with a weird limbo. Because Portland didn’t have a big initial spike, the roll out of governmental regulations and information was slow to hit everyone. At my day job, for example, masks were not required until July, which seems criminally late now. Most people shifted to working from home, but a lot of us were left to keep the job going at the facility.
Work got busy, but creativity took a big hit. I kept creative projects for evenings and weekends, so by Monday I would feel like I did something worthwhile. It felt good to have things on the calendar.
For the first few months, I didn’t know how to get back to being productive outside of my day job. I worked longer hours and on weekends, because there were things to do - accomplishments. Tasks to cross off a list.
But over and over again, it came back to: What do I do if I can’t create anymore?
In 2020, my main focus has been learning how to write fiction: submitting stories to magazines, looking for publication, building a portfolio so when the next submission period comes around, I will be ready. Some real progress was being made, but most of all I felt creative. I felt like I was able to sit down and bust out words. Night after night, sometimes.
But suddenly I could barely read fiction, let alone try to write it.
Fran Meneses, who is a Vlogger and illustrator I’ve been enjoying lately, said in one of her videos: “Creativity is like a plant, you have to water it.” In talking about the COVID-19 lockdown, she and her husband have been going through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron to try to simulate the watering of their creative plants. They used to go to galleries and talk with other artists, but now they can’t, so they’ve turned to craft.
25th Anniversary Edition of “The Artists Way” by Julia Cameron
In late June, I started listening to The Story Grid Podcast, trying to find more information on story structure and The Hero’s Journey. Story Grid is an intensely analytical look at story structure, but the way it’s presented in The Story Grid Podcast is fascinating and funny. Shawn Coyne, the creator of Story Grid, took a new writer, co-host Tim Grahl, from idea to outline to first draft to editing (and ultimately to published work), through a series of episodes that dives deep into story craft and theory. It broke me open and I dove in. I ordered the book The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know and treated it like the proper textbook it is. I worked through it. I chose my masterwork to study. I took a week off from my day job to read more and go deeper.
“The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know” by Shawn Coyne
And creativity came back. I started to water the plant, and it slowly grew. I gave myself this blog space to write more and be on a schedule - to give myself permission to share. I started writing fiction again and, after some reworking and rewriting, submitted a radio play to a publication.
The anxiety about all of our current issues didn’t go away. I still worry about a lot of things. But I knew, if I didn’t take the time, I’d be even more unhappy later. So my advice to you if you aren’t feeling creative is: Get into the craft of your chosen art form. Do some learning and give yourself the space to not produce. Dive deep. Learn something you’ve been putting off because you were busy. Work the creative muscle until it starts to work itself again.
It is very likely we will be in lockdown for a long time. If you’re not feeling creative right now, that’s alright. I believe in you.
Let me know in the comments if you’d like to hear from other creators about how they’ve been getting back to their art. I’d love to do an interview series.