Character: Vilhelm

Okay, I'm going to try something new today. Maybe it will rock, maybe not.

I went over to BehindtheName and used their random name generator to give me a name. With the meaning of the name as a starting point, I'm going to attempt to create a character. I went into this with no preconceived ideas of what kind of character I wanted. If this ends up sucking, blame Elen, since she sparked the thought process that led here.

Name: Vilhelm
Meaning: derived from wil "will, desire" and helm "helmet, protection"
Implications for the character:
- always wearing a helmet or hat
- intrusively defensive of others (think of awkward sitcom situations)
- not many friends, on account of that being a bad strategy for self-defense
- hell, he could play a "defensive" position on a sports team, if he ends up in a story that would have sports. otherwise, he could make armor or something.
Appearance:
- needs to be physically strong
- descriptive language should have some sort of defensive undertones when possible (i.e. "towered above his enemies", or "brought the wall of hurt down upon this suckah")
- can't be pale - needs to look like he's been outside
- if he wears a hat, a beard should hide his face. If we wears a helmet, the beard is optional. I guess a hood is an alternative to either, because hoods are badass
- scars
- frowns often
Background:
- primary parental-figure needs to exemplify self-sacrifice in a way that he isn't quite imitating
- perhaps he feels guilt for the eventual downfall/failure of said parent-figure

...and there we go - a first stage character sketch. It's pretty generic, obviously, but I think it's a pretty solid foundation to build a more nuanced character on.

From here, I think the next step is choosing a setting for mister Vilhelm, as that will help me nail down the details of his life. But that's for later. In the meantime, he can act as the writing equivalent of a coloring book page -- feel free to supply your own colors to suit your own fancy!

What to Write

I've been kicking this post around for a while, and I'm never really sure what it is I want to say with it. Bear with me while I ramble.

My degree is in English with a specialization in Writing. Here's a brief summary of what I learned in school that I didn't also learn from Stephen King's On Writing:

• Literary fiction is better than genre fiction
• People who write genre fiction are hacks
• Literary writers never wrote bad stories, and if you dislike something, it's your fault

Okay, so that's a cynical assessment (I'll give a fair one someday), but that seemed to be the prevailing attitude among people who liked the canon. You were of sub-par intelligence if you liked Harry Potter, and doubly so if you disliked Shakespeare. Granted, most of this came from students because none of the professors actually bothered to read anything that wasn't pre-approved by Conclave of Literary Overlords (again, a cynical statement -- I'm about as fair and balanced as FoxNews today), but it was a horrible atmosphere for us fantasy writers.

Anyway, in the two creative writing classes I took, we were told not to write genre fiction. The intro professor was actually lenient about this, since we were keeping up a journal of daily writings -- I was able to write a fantasy story because she got to see all of my notes and was able to understand the world. There were no exceptions in the advanced class, but rather than complain about it, I threw myself into it and wrote some pretty good stuff. It was the first time I had taken any of my attempts at "literary" fiction beyond a first draft, and I found that I enjoyed it quite a bit.

But then, somehow, I started morphing into one of those elitist assholes who writes because he "has something to say." I started channeling all of the hurt and frustration gathered between 1996 and 2004 and aiming it at all of the churches and churchgoers who caused it. It was a slow process, and the stories were decently well-written at first, but as things progressed, I became angrier and more heavy-handed, to the point where my wife actually told me to stop writing those stories and go back to fantasy.

It was a sobering moment for me. I had been telling myself I could write a great critique of Americanized Christianity in the form of loosely interconnected short stories -- in short, I had ceased writing because I loved telling stories in order to use stories as a weapon. Malevolent and didactic, I had completely forsaken what drew me toward writing in the first place.

Which sort of gets to why I'm writing this blog. Sometimes people like to pretend they have two options: Doing what they love, or selling out. I think that's a completely fictitious dichotomy, but that's not even the point. My struggle was between two types of writing I was passionate about -- one that allowed me to be stretch my imagination, and one that allowed me to make a point. Both were fueled by my love for writing, but one was clearly capable of leading me astray.

The question, then, is how to decide the "what" and the "how" of the writing, and how to avoid using fiction as a glorified blog. I don't have an answer to that yet, because I haven't tried leaving fantasy in a few months. The idea scares me. I don't want to become an angry person in order to write, and I certainly don't want to become one of those beatniks with "something to say." If I'm going to write, I want it to be because I like writing, not yelling.

A Taste of WIP

Alright, then, here's a chunk of the current WIP, as promised. I've conveniently made it available as a rich text file and as a PDF. Enjoy!

In other news, I'm thinking of abandoning Blogger. I've also noticed that all the cool kids use Wordpress. Any thoughts?

Fear and Apprehension

Over a month ago I said that I would actually post something I had written. I'll try and make good on that over lunch today, provided I don't freak out and think it's utterly worthless like the stereotypical writer has a tendency to do. I'm actually going to get my whining and insecurity out of the way now: Even after I make corrections to the part I'm going to post, I won't consider it "as good as it could be" and will likely go through another five revisions before I decide to leave it alone... blah blah blah etc whine complain.

In this instance, most of my insecurity is due to the fact that I use this blog to talk about the act of writing -- what I've learned about it and would like to share. My horrible, dark secret is that I don't follow all of my advice (at that moment, all of the writers in the room rolled their eyes) and I certainly don't write good first drafts (and, grinning, shook their heads). In my head, I know writers get this, but I still harbor the irrational fear that when I serve up the pudding, I'll be mocked for not having the cup of proof that is supposed to be in there (or, in some cases, substituting said proof with two cups of BS).

Anyway, coming up at some point today will be a snippet from my work in progress, which still doesn't have a title. It might be modified slightly to make sense as a short story, or I might just leave things as they are and see what happens. Who knows.

Hackers and Crackers: A Linguistic Dilemma

A group of hackers wired a bunch of money to a foreign account. Someone hacked into the school's database and gave A's to everyone. Put up a firewall to guard against hackers. What is a hacker? Well, according to the news, entertainment, and most people you talk to, a hacker is a person who circumvents computer security. Works for me.

But one day, a kid on a message board made a post to clarify: crackers are people who break into computers; hackers are people who modify their computer's software to improve performance. Also, hackers don't like that their title is applied to people who do illegal stuff.

Ok, that's cool, too. I guess. I mean, it makes sense -- "cracker" seems to hearken back to safe-cracking, so that's cool. I don't know where "hacker" comes from, but I can accept it. It's nice to have a distinction.

So what do you call them in your fiction? Do you go with definitions, or with common usage? 

I bring this up for the benefit of new writers, those who are relatively new to the peer review process. The hacker/cracker issue may not apply to your current project, but I think it exemplifies a general concept I'm just going to call the "proper/common" issue. Now it's story time...

Writing fiction is far different from writing a research paper. I know that should go without saying, but I really want to stress it: Writing fiction is far different from writing a research paper. It is not the same as doing homework.

When I first started my adventures in fiction, I attended a couple writer's groups (Borders in Flint and Auburn Hills, for you Michiganders). One week I invited a friend from my Japanese class to sit in and maybe read something of hers. I read a section from something I had written (it was about eight or ten pages, double-spaced). The feedback I received from the regulars was pretty standard -- You don't have enough description; Your dialogue was good, but you should describe what they're doing; I have no idea where the hell your characters are because you don't describe it very well. I was pleased with the response, because they didn't find anything glaring that destroyed the story.

My friend asked if she could hang on to her copy for a few days. I said that was fine, since I had eight other copies to look over and decide which suggestions to follow. She gave it back to me a few days later, in class.

I think there was more of her writing on that thing than mine.

My first thought was that she spent a lot of time really analyzing the piece, and had written every single complaint and compliment that crossed her mind. That was not the case -- the margins were packed with things like, "incomplete sentence" or "missing words", even "don't start a sentence with 'and'". I was astounded. Not only did she apply the rules of grammar to the narrator, she hit all of the dialogue as well. Each page's margins were overflowing with rules-oriented comments, and the half-blank last page included a long note about how she expected good writers, but that everyone missed all the basic rules of grammar, so she couldn't take them seriously.

I'm not making this up. I still have that copy somewhere, because it was too beautiful to throw away.

The point of all of this is that prescriptive rules of grammar are pretty meaningless in fiction. If the general populace says "hacker," then it makes no sense for the characters in your story to say "cracker" -- unless they are real-life hackers who care about such distinctions. The characters in my story are not going to speak with perfect grammar because no one speaks with perfect grammar.  Even my "narrator," who has no discernable personality because the story is told in the third person, will not speak with perfect grammar because he's telling a story. This isn't an academic paper.

Do we still have to put our verbs in the middle of the sentence? Of course -- that's a descriptive rule, whose purpose is to describe how our language already works. To say that we shouldn't end sentences with prepositions is silly -- people do it all the time without creating confusion. That's a rule that was invented by a bunch of dead guys who wanted to sound smarter than everyone else. English worked fine before that rule existed, and it continues to thrive in spite of it.

Write your stories. Damn the rules. Let your characters speak like real people, not textbooks.

Final Sven

Beginning Word Count: 10,948
End Word Count: 23,364
Words written: 12,416

Notes taken in editing stage: 2,482
Words added to WIP so far: 356 
WIP-related writing (notes, scrapped scenes, etc.): 4369

Total words written for Sven: 19,623

Yeah, that's less than a third of my goal at the beginning of this...oh well. It's more than 0, and that counts for something. I blame the holidays, my apartment flood, and....uhhhh..... something else?