Thursday, March 27, 2008

Writing Excuses (dot com)

A couple of months ago, the creator of one of my favorite webcomics launched a website, with two guys I had never heard of, called Writing Excuses. I finally got around to listening to the podcasts yesterday, and I highly recommend checking them out.

It's basically just three guys sitting around and talking about writing, only the three guys happen to be a successful webcartoonist, a guy who received an offer for his first horror novel, and the guy who is going to finish The Wheel of Time. They make fifteen-minute podcasts to discuss an aspect of the craft. Each of them has a unique style, so the listener is presented with multiple approaches to the act of writing being discussed. I learned quite a bit (possibly more than I did in college, getting a degree in writing) from listening to them, and was able to scratch out a few notes to myself on how to improve the story I'm working on.

I'll give an example. I believe it was in Episode 6: Flaws vs Handicaps where a question came up of how to make a flawed character. This is something I've struggled with, because I always feel like I'm at one of the extremes -- either my character is flawless, or completely useless. Even when I think I've done an okay job in that area, sometimes I still think I have a boring person to read. There were two concepts in the podcast that jumped out at me:

1. A flaw is something you overcome; a handicap is not.
2. To know what flaws to give your character, figure out what the conflict is, and give your character the flaw that will make him lose that conflict.

In regards to 1, I immediately thought of an error I made when I hit the reset button on my novel. I decided that, in order to make him more interesting, I would give Gabriel chronic health problems, and make him bitter because of that. Then, once I started writing his interactions with his sister, I thought, "Well, she's really kind to him, so he wouldn't grow up angry." The result was an un-flawed character with a handicap. By taking away his bitterness toward life, I removed the only thing that could potentially serve to mark his growth as a person.

As for 2, this concept was like being handed a solid gold key to good storytelling. In retrospect, it should have been obvious. What makes a conflict compelling? When you think the main character could actually fail. The best flaw to give a character is the one that could potentially spell doom for him and/or everything he holds dear. Is the conflict a final showdown with the bad guy? A common flaw is to let the desire for revenge cloud judgment. A negotiation with a hostile foreign leader? Make the person racist. It makes so much more sense now than when professors kept repeated, "Flawed characters are interesting. Flawed characters are interesting. Flawed characters are interesting."

I'm a better writer for having listened to these guys. Go check out Writing Excuses and report back with what you've learned!

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke died. I don't consider myself a rabid fan of his (I haven't even read 2001), but I own one of his books. I still haven't even read the whole thing, which makes me feel weird for saying he has had an enormous impact on my imagination and the way I approach writing.

My first encounter with Mr. Clarke's writing was a story called "The Nine Billion Names of God". It was in one of my lit textbooks, though it was not assigned reading for the class. I was flipping through the book to get to the forgettable classic I was required to read that night and the title caught my eye. The author's name looked familiar, but I didn't know where I'd seen it before. I decided to give the story a go.

Obviously I wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't been mesmerized. The story was short, but the characters all had the kind of depth that lit professors gush over. On top of that, and probably the reason it wasn't included in my class, the events that took place were a few levels beyond ordinary. This wasn't another politically-charged story about a guy who experiences the same things I go through every day -- this was an exploration of our assumptions about reality, played out in some unnamed mountains, with an unspecified religious order and a couple technicians from a computer company. It was different from the drivel that is force-fed to English majors. It was fresh. I wanted more.

Of course, school being what it is, I soon found myself swimming in papers and readings and forgot about the concept of "leisure reading." It was more or less an accident that I stumbled upon the massive tome of Clarke stories. As I said before, I haven't read the entire book. The thing is huge, and I had some other things I wanted to read -- things that fit more neatly in my backpack. What I did read, though, was amazing. It's been over a year now... I hope I can find that book when I move.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

What the H are you doing, Stan?

My last blog entries seemed like a long time ago, so I think I need to explain why I'm still a writer despite my apparent lack of...you know, writing.

Obviously I've been doing some brainstorming exercises on here, to kind of showcase my writing process. It's kind of misleading, though, because my standard process doesn't involve my blog, so I'm already straying from the norm. You could say this is another type of process for me.

That is still happening. Usually I push words around for a week or more before posting them. The result is typically a long blog -- but I prefer that to a two-line piece. I also like to have things slightly polished before presenting them. Yes, the result is a less-than-genuine mind dump, but it's way more fun for me.

I do need to confess to some downtime, but I got over that. I started drawing again. I intend to take a story I started in one of my college classes and adapt it to the comic medium... if I can increase my art skills. I want to do this because it will force me to think about backgrounds and setting and all of that, which is typically weak in my writing. The goal is to go way outside my normal mode of operation and force myself to think in different ways. I hope it works. I've begun laying out the structure of that story, and I'll begin some sort of scripting in the next few weeks.

I put Gabriel down for a nap and sent what I have to a few people to read over. I'd rather rewrite this chunk than finish the whole story and have to rewrite everything at once. Then, yesterday, I started having ideas for where that story should go. It should go without saying that those got written down. People are taking their sweet time getting back to me, so I may end up pressing on soon anyway.

Anyway, the point is that I'm still writing -- just not always in my blog!