Is that a Vegetable Gremlin on your desk, you freak? Yes, and here’s what he reminds me to do when I’m writing.
Allow me to explain.
~~In this post~~
What Gremlins 2 (and Key and Peele) taught me about writing
Fear not your fever dreams
I pull more writing lessons from my arse!
~~~
Sitting on my writing desk, next to a trio of fancifully bizarre figurines from Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights and a pomodoro timer (that I don’t use often enough), is a vintage collector card featuring the Vegetable Gremlin from Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
If you've seen Gremlins 2, you know exactly who I’m talking about—the gremlin made entirely of vegetables that pops out of a salad bar. There is a very thin backstory about him ingesting some genetically modified vegetable seeds, but he contributes nothing to the plot, and in a less unhinged movie, it would have been utter madness. This leafy little chaos goblin simply exists because it has never existed before and someone thought it should.
But you don’t need to watch the movie. All you need is this Key & Peele sketch below. If you haven't seen it, stop reading this and go watch it right now. I'll wait. In it, Jordan Peele plays Star Magic Jackson Jr., the Hollywood sequel doctor brought in to jazz up the Gremlins 2 brainstorming session. He has exactly one note: IT'S IN THE MOVIE.
And the absolute BEST BIT? Gremlins and Gremlins 2 director Joe Dante, after seeing this sketch, confirmed that this is exactly how the session went down. Everyone gets to design their own gremlin!* (More about this in the footnote because the truth is more complicated and, frankly, upsets my post’s mojo!)
I think about Star Magic Jackson Jr. a lot.
Like many speculative fiction writers, I love that exploratory, dance-like-nobody-is-watching phase. Just you and the blank page and every weird, embarrassing, fever-dream idea that floats through your brain at 2am. But for the majority of my life, what did I do with those moments of freedom? I censored myself. I thought that's too weird, or I can’t imagine anyone will understand that, or I can’t put in a Vegetable Gremlin because that’s way too unconventional for such-and-such genre, and think of the gross fan art.
To which I say: why not?
Not because every fever dream deserves to survive the final draft (wouldn’t that be some book, though?), but because the act of censoring yourself before you’ve even written the thing would be like stripping your unique DNA from your baby (because that’s what our books are to us, right?) before it even has a chance to gestate. And then you end up with a boring ol’ generic big-box store baby. I don’t know if this metaphor is still working, but I think you get the drift.
During a first draft, you need Star Magic Jackson Jr in your corner, reminding you that “it’s called brainstorming, not a brain drizzlin’, sweet pea.” And I’d like to take this even further than Mr. Jackson Jr. I say that you leave your door wide open to Vegetable Gremlins (or Bat Gremlin, or Googly-eyed Gremlin, etc), not just during the brainstorm, but at every single stage of writing your book.
All those weird ideas that surface, the ones that make you wince, that feel too dark, too strange, too much, deserve at least a second of consideration because they’re often the ones that are most uniquely you. And if, by some chance, that weird idea may already exist in someone else’s art (because there’s really nothing new under the sun, is there?), your brain came up with that diving thing all on its own.
My fantasy novel has a magic system that can literally turn words into nasty objects and creatures that get expelled from my main character’s dainty mouth. I almost nixed this idea because it felt like a bit too much body horror for the book's overall tone. The aesthetics too fan-art-unfriendly. Too hard to rationalize within my magic system mechanics.
But I kept it because I couldn’t get the images out of my head, and that’s because an anxious person literally vomiting out a slew of unintelligible nonsense because of their lack of confidence in their communication skills is exactly how I feel when my mind goes blank in the middle of a conversation, and I end up babbling on and on. In the end, it became the heart of the entire book. What’s more, my beta readers and agent fell in love with it specifically.
Your Vegetable Gremlin might be your magic system, or character who refuses to behave, or a backstory that seems to have wandered in from a completely different universe, or whatever.
Let it exist. Humor it and let it argue for its right to sit at the table. You can always cut it later.
And that leads us to the part that becomes slightly less fun, but is the most rewarding: ensuring that Vegetable Gremlin earns his place if he really wants to stay in your book. So here’s the rule: let the Vegetable Gremlin in the door at any given moment of your process, but don't let him stay for free. Plant the seeds for him now and water them for the future, or send him backwards to previous chapters in a time-hopping DeLorean and make him plant and water his own seeds before you allow him back to the future. ( I was a child of the ‘80s, can you tell?)
So, yeah, set the groundwork. No doubt, you already knew this without the need to invoke any ‘80s pop culture. If you want something in a story, you do the work and make it belong in the story, which, of course, curbs the amount of unhinged fever-dream fodder you include. But if you can actually take that idea, plant the seeds, weave in the logic, and make it feel inevitable in hindsight, then that, my friends, is a rewarding feeling!
If he doesn't earn his place? You chop him up, lovingly and with gratitude for what he taught you about your own imagination, and freeze-dry him to maybe revive and use for another time. Like Han Solo. (Sorry, couldn’t resist one more!)
Let the Vegetable Gremlin in the door at any given moment of your process, but don't let him stay for free.
Now, the Hieronymus Bosch figurines on my desk are there for similar reasons, but the lessons for each aren’t as finely pointed.
The Helmeted Bird, the Ears with a Knife, the Bird in a Blue Egg held up by a bunch of naked dudes remind me that one of the most enduring creative works in human history is completely unhinged, and people will never, ever stop analyzing it. That and they’re just absolutely delightful to look at.
Of course, scholars have written about what these figures may have represented to Bosch ad nauseum (hehe, do you see how I snuck in another reference to word vomiting?), but you can research that.
But I can attempt to offer writing lessons from each, as I have no problems sourcing some out of my arse on the spot! Force them to earn their place on my writing desk, if you will. And if anyone would approve of plucking ideas out of an arse, it would be Hieronymus Bosch (See image).
Even more writing lessons for me? Oh darling, you shouldn’t have!
The Helmeted Bird
As I said, unlike Veggie Gremlin, I’ve not had a chance to audition these writing lessons to see whether or not they’ve got staying power. I might be grasping at straws here but bear with me.
The Helmeted Bird
So, this crow-like creature carries a writing tool and an inkwell in its beak, which means it writes! It also has a severed foot hanging from its helmet and an arrow in its thigh. So, maybe it can remind us that the act of creation is costly, but always worth it? Also, put on your armor and be ready to defend your creative choices! Or whatever.
The ears will cut you if you don’t listen!
The Ears with a Knife
The Ears with a Knife can remind us to listen to our characters! Let them tell where they want to go, and not force them to go where we want them to go at knife point. The punishment for not listening is that they’ll pull out their own knife and get stabby on you! Sounds plausible?
Weird Bird in Blue Egg
The Weird Bird in a Blue Egg with Bunny on its Beak and Tulip with Legs on its Head.
Your job as a writer is to hatch something that has never existed before. It will be fragile, so hold it carefully. If needed, enlist a bunch of bare-ass naked dudes for help.
Wow, you made it to the end! But wait, before you go, you absolutely must check out this awesome interactive, audio-visual hi-res digital exhibit of The Garden of Earthly Delights that really brings the masterpiece to life. Also, if I was that sort of person
*Even Joe Dante thought that a sequel to his original was unnecessary, and this movie was a parody of the unoriginal sequels that the Hollywood movie factory spat out at the time. It also functions as a social satire and has a fair amount of Donald Trump bashing (way before he became America’s #45). In light of all this, Gremlins 2 is *chef’s kiss* as far as I’m concerned. I’m sure Vegetable Gremlin was born from some commentary about the ‘80s fitness craze, so, in context, he’s not meaningless. But that is neither here nor there for the purposes of this writing lesson, as we are only concerned with effective storytelling.