A Story of an Octopus
The writing process according to Bluey
I’ve been watching a lot of Bluey with my toddler and it is, without a doubt, one of the best children’s shows I’ve ever seen. If you want a full rant about my love of this show and a rundown of my favorite episodes, you should check out my latest podcast.
For now, I’d like to delve further into a particular favorite episode called “Octopus,” which is episode 41 of season 2. In this episode, Bluey’s friend Chloe is over at their house, and Bluey suggests they play Octopus with her dad. He sits on the couch and waves his arms around and makes bubbly, gurgly octopus noises while Bluey and Chloe try to walk past the couch to steal his treasure. He will occasionally grab at them to prevent them from getting it, but for the most part, they are successful and have a ton of fun.
On the way home, Chloe asks her dad if they can play Octopus when they get home, and he says yes. So we go into their (much more neat and organized) living room, he sits on the couch, and Chloe tells him to be an octopus and he says, “Okay. Hello, I’m an octopus.” And she tells him that’s not right. Then she says he has to protect his treasure but he says octopuses don’t have treasure. Then he lets her walk right past him to get the treasure. Then he won’t let her pass him at all. They go back and forth and eventually decide not to play the game, because they each keep telling each other “no, that’s not what an octopus is like” or “no, that’s not how the game is played.”
Some time passes, and Chloe goes to check in on her dad and he’s busy at the computer, doing research on octopuses. They get super into it together, learning all about the creature and its underwater mates. The two also agree that instead of saying “no” to each other while playing, they will say, “yes, this octopus does that” just to keep it fun. To finish the episode, Bluey comes over to Chloe’s house and they play the now revamped version of the game, with scientifically accurate octopus facts thrown in, and improv rules they make up on the spot.
And my poor English-major brain just couldn’t help but see a correlation between the entire plot of this 8-minute story and the writing process. We don’t really get to see much of Bluey’s creative process in initially creating the Octopus game, so I’m just going to focus on the character Chloe for this metaphor.
First, we start with an idea. Some ideas are purely internal from the deep recesses of our brain, but I would argue most ideas stem from external factors, like seeing something inspirational in nature, reading a book you fell in love with, or having a conversation with a friend. Chloe, of course, is given her idea directly through Bluey.
And her first step? Stealing. Which, let’s be honest, is what most of us do. Picasso says “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Author Austin Kleon has a whole book titled Steal like an Artist. J.R.R. Tolkien often discussed his cauldron of story, or collection of stories he has experienced throughout his life that influence his own creative work. Ecclesiastes 1:9 says “There is nothing new under the sun.” And, look at that, I just stole from 4 different men to get my point across. Initially, Chloe’s octopus game is intended to be exactly like Bluey’s octopus game.
But then she runs into some roadblocks. First of all, it’s impossible for it to be the exact same, because she and her dad are completely different from Bluey and her dad. So no matter what, her story, though stolen, will be told through a whole new perspective. Then we get into the issue of conflict. First, her dad makes it too easy for Chloe to get the treasure, and then he makes it too hard. This is something Michael Kardos discusses in The Art and Craft of Fiction. When it comes to putting your characters (whether fictional or nonfictional) into situations, you want to “make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” This means that the stakes should be high enough to get the readers interested, but not so high that they are impossible. We want to root for characters that struggle a bit but ultimately succeed, which is what Chloe wanted out of her game.
When Chloe and her dad hit these roadblocks, they gave up for a while. They took a break, spent some time apart, maybe embraced the silence and the uncertainty of writer’s block. But then they got back to work, with some outside sources to help. They did their research to make their game better! This is especially necessary if writing any kind of nonfiction, but even useful in fiction stories. For example, when there is no research done, we get cringey lines like we see in the “Men Writing Women” subreddit. You don’t have to only write in your own perspective, but you need to do your homework about the other perspectives you’d like to include as well. Take some time to have conversations with people, read other works that you’d like to imitate, and study subjects you are unfamiliar with. All these things will help you create a more accurate and enjoyable story.
Finally, Chloe and her dad accept the improv rules of “yes and.” Even if it didn’t quite make sense for the original game, or for what real octopuses are like, for the sake of the fun, they would say yes. This is something Chad Davidson and Greg Fraser discuss in their book Writing Poetry: “practicing poets often revel not in ‘either/or’ binary constructions (where choice resides between two options), but in ‘both/and’ ambiguities (where many syntactical avenues remain viable).” Yes, we want to tell a true story, but as writers, we are allowed to be a little bit creative. We are allowed to live in ambiguity and nonsense. We are allowed to use poetic license. We are allowed to have imaginations. Tim O’Brien basically invents a whole new genre called “faction” which is a mix of fact and fiction for the sake of the story. Sometimes real life doesn’t tell a good narrative. Sometimes we need the story to work out a certain way to get across a certain truth. And sometimes that means embellishing a little. And as long as you’re not writing an academic paper or an autobiography or something else that needs to be 100% factual, that’s okay! This octopus can have electric arms because, yes, that is more fun.
Maybe I’m stretching here, but I do think the writers at Bluey are way cleverer than we give them credit for, and I’d like to think there was some real intentionality behind this episode about a silly child’s imagination. In fact, they have a whole other episode called Curry Quest where the mom very clearly explains all the steps in a typical hero’s quest, so I know the writers are thinking through things like this. This is the process of creation, whether that’s playing a game, writing a story, painting a canvas, composing a tune, etc. etc. And as we are all creators in some way, I think there is something here we can learn from Chloe.