The Mini-Recorder, aka Pure Gold

It takes an hour to get to work in the morning, and an extra fifteen minutes or so to get home in the afternoon. That ends up being a lot of time alone with my thoughts, which often turn to my writing and what I want to accomplish in it. Now, some days I would be lucky, and I'd be near my destination when ideas struck, but more often than not I would develop something, growing more and more excited, only to forget it by the time I had access to paper or a computer.

Eventually I grew frustrated enough that I started looking up mini-recorders online. Microcassette recorders are really cheap these days, so I started looking to see what kind of digital technology would be in my budget. There is some pretty sweet stuff out there for people with tons of money to blow, and once I was done pawing at the screen I decided on a forty dollar one at Best Buy. It's digital and can allegedly store way more audio than I need, but it doesn't have USB connectivity. I did crave the USB, but I think I might be better off for not having it.

I keep this bad boy in the car, and if an idea strikes, I hit the record button and mumble awkwardly into it. By the end of the week, I've usually got around ten sound bytes. Since the thing doesn't have USB connectivity, I can't just drag them onto my computer -- I'm forced to listen to them and type them up, which gets my brain working on the ideas again, so I end up with even more material than I would if I sat down and tried to remember everything.

Obviously this sort of thing isn't for everyone, but I highly recommend it to any writer who spends a lot of time in the car.

Constructing a World, part one

Today I'm going to talk about a specific act of writing, rather than a general concept. As you may have guessed from the title, it's going to be about building a world for your characters to inhabit. While this may sound like something that only applies to sci-fi and fantasy, it comes in handy for realistic settings as well, because you really end up doing the same thing, just on a smaller scale.

I'm currently in the process of building a world, so all of this is in the first half of "trial and error." That means I reserve the right to contradict myself in a few months.

Every work of fiction takes place somewhere. I can hear people objecting, saying, "I wrote something that takes place in a guy's mind!", but I would just say that for our purposes, "world" simply refers to the setting of the story (where and when the story takes place) and the foundation upon which that setting is built (which may or may not involve itself in the story). Basically, "a guy's mind" would be considered a part or the whole of the world in that particular story.

While the setting involves a time period, location, objects in the environment - things that directly affect the character - the world exists beyond the scope of the story and its qualities shape the story and its characters. One of the first things to get a grasp of is the world's immediate history. Figure out what the top headlines would be -- was someone robbed or murdered? If so, how close were they to the characters involved in the story? These are the kinds of things that will weigh on people's minds for a time and potentially affect the way they see and interact with the world. Also know about smaller things, like if a new subdivision recently replaced one of your characters' childhood hangouts. These  are important details to know because they provide a context for your characters to meet and interact in. It's the difference between having an actual set and having cardboard cutouts behind the actors in a movie -- the cutouts might get the job done, but it's a whole lot easier to believe in the set.

Once the immediate history is settled, take your characters for a test drive. Get started on your story and ask yourself, "Do I know enough about the past for this story to work?" If the answer is yes, then great! It means you're that much closer to the final product. If no, that means it's time to go back even further.

If you need ancient history, your best bet is to start reading. Learn about real-world history, even if you're planning on creating an entirely fictional world. It also helps to look into the various mythologies that have existed at different periods in time (I recommend pantheon.org) to help shape the beliefs of your characters. Draw on these things as you create your own universe, as it really helps make your characters more complex.

Challenge: Write about an event that took place a thousand years before the story you are working on. Re-write that event as you think it would be known to the characters of your story. Keep in mind the tendency of time to distort the truth, particularly if good records are not kept.

The Blogger's Hypocrisy: A Lesson

I haven't written in this blog for quite a long time. In the true spirit of professionalism, I'm going to lay the blame on school, my wedding, and the beginning of my full-time employment.

Actually, I don't want to leave the impression that I haven't been writing. There were a few months where I used "too busy!" as an excuse not to write, and I paid for it. Here's how:

The stories I'm working on are of varying lengths -- many are short stories, but I have a few ideas that would fill something longer. Everything I've been working on has suffered because of my refusal to make time to write. The most obvious problem is that I lost the direction of many of my stories; I forgot why certain characters were being forced to interact with each other, and by extension lost the basis for the story. Luckily, I keep notes handy, so recovering that momentum was a matter of spending an hour re-reading the story and reviewing and revising all related documents. That's the simplest problem to handle.

The difficult issue to overcome is that I lost a lot of my drive to write. I got out of the habit of writing every day, and then into the habit of filling my writing time with distractions like TV and video games. What happened when I tried to pick it back up? I had reverted to the state of being an "inspiration" writer, the kind of person who only writes when he happens to be at a computer when a good idea strikes. I stopped pushing myself to try new things and took an undisciplined approach to writing, and as a result, was unable to write anything I found satisfying.

I think I've made huge strides against this one. In the past few weeks, I've made a point to sit down and write at least 300 words, and that has helped immensely. Even when I'm not satisfied with what I write, I'm a lot more motivated to write another draft in the hopes of getting it, if not right, then better. 

Challenge: Berate yourself for your laziness and your petty excuses! Then write 300 words.