Fictional Discipline

Yes, Indeed

2008-06-25T12:58:00.003-04:00

Dear Friends,

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

Just kidding! I don't have a messiah complex.

But I do have a new website.

Check it out.

Later!

http://www.stanmanx.com

(I'll be checking comments here for a while, though, so let me know if you have viewing/commenting issues)

Get Smart, the movie

2008-06-24T08:54:00.003-04:00

Don't leave! Also, don't punch me in the nose! Movies are fine, really!

I recently saw Get Smart, and while I don't have the patience to write a real review, I will say that it's awesome (also, frikkin sweet). However, the point of this blog isn't so much to talk about how great it was, but to analyze one of the things that worked, which can be applied to fiction writing in general.

I'm referring to the character of Maxwell Smart. He underscores the failure of all other writers to produce a believable highly-trained-yet-inept main character. Think of any movie starring a cop/spy/CEO/coach who is incapable of doing his job, but due to a series of coincidences and a whole lotta heart, he is able to save the day and get the girl. These movies are typically comedies, and we typically forgive the writers for this because we don't know any better.

The key to Max's success as a character is that he is not inept. Far from it! He's meticulous, fluent in Russian, a good shot, a quick thinker, and generally has good people skills. Additionally, he is accident prone, a little too detail-oriented at times, and sometimes says or does the wrong thing, but for reasons that make sense on some level.

In other words, he's a pretty well-rounded character whose more hilarious aspects are played up for the sake of comedy. The laughter comes from thinking, "This guy is highly trained! How can he do that?", rather than the typical, "Wow, that guy is not even qualified for the insane levels of responsibility he has! He would never even be in that position in the real world!"

See the difference? In Max's case, the audience believes his character earned his position, and the tension comes from seeing character flaws in action. In other comedies in this vein, the source of tension is the audience's disbelief that "that idiot" ever got to "where he's at." Overall, I think Maxwell Smart is more successful.

But hey, that's just me...

A mess of descriptions

2008-06-23T13:11:00.003-04:00

The desk itself was wobbly, which enhanced the aura of disarray. It wasn't just the half-empty box of allergy meds or the assorted papers that had piled up over the course of weeks. The pens were sticking out at different angles, and some were in upside-down. He had two pairs of glasses -- the one that gave him headaches, and the one that took them away -- one of which was balanced precariously on the edge of the desk.

----

Speaking of headaches, I've got a killer one.

9 minutes

2008-06-20T12:43:00.003-04:00

I need to say something, and I have to say it fast. There isn't much time! I've just discovered that I drive through some kind of wormhole or cross-dimensional transit whatsit during my commute to work, and the recent rainstorms and power outages have caused it shift slightly -- it only spans the southbound half of the road! This is a problem! What if I'm already home when I get home? Where the hell am I supposed to park? But I can't very well drive north in the southbound lane during rush hour, because that could very well be fatal, and if I die in this universe, who is going to tell my wife?

Four minutes! This communique will be disrupted and possibly disappear from existence so you need to act now! For only twelve payments of fourteen ninety five you can get me the hell out of here! I'm stuck in a world where

which is why I think a few minutes a day is better, in the long run, than several hours once a week. Well, looks like lunch is over. Take care!

no visuals

2008-06-19T21:46:00.005-04:00

My great grandparents lived in a mobile home park off some busy highway or another. There was a small playground across from their house -- I remember there was a slide and some swings, and maybe one of those things that you spin around on until the earth rotates in reverse. A short walk in the opposite direction led to a pool. If I sit still and close my eyes, I can feel the water caress my face, taste the chlorine on my hands as I give in to the nailbiting urge, already deeply rooted in my six year old psyche. When I climb out, the cement is both rough and slippery beneath my feet, and if I move too quickly, someone cautions me not to run. It's hard -- I really want to jump back in.

I can't remember the layout of the pool.

Traffic roared like a home game arena. It wasn't noticeable from the pool, but we could see the cars from the playground. The smell of baking blacktop was ever-present in the summer, like the noise of the traffic. It was comforting. It was a part of who my great grandparents were.

At some point they moved out of the park and into a house with my aunt. I was getting older, starting to see them less. My aunt got married and moved away; my great grandparents moved into an assisted living facility. I occasionally joined my mom when she went to see them, but even at sixteen it's hard to understand the impermanence of life. They died while I was studying music in Memphis. It was very difficult to hurt, which left me feeling guilty. The people I got most excited to see as a child were gone, and I couldn't even cry at the news.

I work in an office on some busy highway or another. As I step outside to walk to my car, the smell of baking blacktop and the roar of traffic hit me. I stop and close my eyes; fragments of memories swirl around me, whispering, laughing. A lump forms in my throat and I run to my car and nearly drop my keys as I'm getting in. I scroll through the list of contacts I never call until I reach my wife's name. She picks up; my breathing evens out. I let her know I'm on my way.

Awesome

2008-06-18T12:49:00.003-04:00

I made a couple tweaks around this here blog. The most obvious one is the totally flippin sweet banner, courtesy of my frikkin awesome wife. Seriously. She rocks.

The other one is that I changed the bullet image. Flowers? No thanks. It's now a circle, also courtesy of my wife because I am that lazy.

check
it
out

I'm pretty pleased. I always liked the colors of this theme, but it came with too many frills and laces for my liking. Now I like it much more.

I also put in some writing time last night. Not too much, but enough to get the proverbial ball rolling. That's always exciting. Normally when I'm working on a story, I just start writing and see what happens, then go back and rewrite it several times. That process kind of blows with longer works because starting from scratch leads to trashing everything and making something completely different. For this one, I decided to try starting with a plot outline to see if a clear sense of direction helps keep me focused. I think part of the reason my longer stuff tends to fall to pieces is because I reach a point where I don't know what to do, and therefore do nothing. Not the best approach. Maybe this approach will help. Maybe not. We'll see.

Variations on "The Blank Page"

2008-06-17T12:08:00.000-04:00

Anyone who has ever attempted to maintain a regular writing schedule has written and expounded on the following sentence:

I'm sitting at my desk, staring at the blank computer screen, wishing I could think of something to write.

It's a good standby because it inevitably leads to something, even if that something is just "more writing." I've seen introspective pieces about writer's block, fantastic alien abduction stories, and bizarre stream-of-consciousness....experiments. Complaining about being unable to write can lead to wonderful places.

Unfortunately, complaining about not having time to write just leads to procrastination. Maybe. I guess my complaining has all been verbal, rather than written, which is undoubtedly the problem. Here are some interesting facts about my activities in the last month or so:

Close to 100 hours of Pokemon
Probably 20 hours of Lego Star Wars
Watching assorted movies and TV shows on an almost nightly basis
Complaining about how I never write, never exercise, and never read (for recreation or for learning)

Yeah, I really don't have time to write. I just have time to screw around and let my dreams die. It requires a whole lot less effort, anyway.

My main problem, really, is that I don't make the effort at home. Instead, I try to write while I'm at work (like I am now, actually). I start a new post and stare at the empty text field. Then someone says something funny, and I get distracted. Then I eat food. Then I work and try to cram thoughts in while queries are running. It's not the right environment. So I sit here, not knowing what to write, with an empty text field in front of me, cursor blinking like a silent metronome of judgment.... and so on. And look where it has led! There are words.

Writing for Marketing

2008-06-12T12:49:00.003-04:00

I wrote marketing copy at my company for a while. It was kind of off and on, and they recently hired someone else who is going to be taking over (thankfully). A more scholarly person would draw comparisons between writing fiction and writing to sell stuff, but all I have to say is that in both cases you are making stuff up.

The experience was kind of eye-opening for me. At first I was excited about learning a new technique, and how to think from a different perspective. But it got old. Especially when I was writing glowing praises for a piece of software that is as bugged as the Nixon-era White House. Most especially when I learned that a customer had already been using said software for over a year.

The boss man is a smart guy. He knows stuff. He also has a tendency to assume his employees know nothing, so meetings with him last forever. In those meetings, he spent a lot of time talking about how placing restraints on the creative process allows for more potent creativity from the writer -- something I have long believed, on account of everything I've read and written. But he also wanted to come up with a Detailed Marketing Copy Writing and Editing Super Good Stuff Process so that a person with no knowledge of our software could write the same calibur marketing documents that I could (note: I'm involved in design and testing, so I know our software pretty well). This is where I start to smell something funny.

I'm going to assume that anyone reading this is somewhat familiar with the hero's journey. I think it's a wonderful outline for an epic tale. However, I think it takes more than just that outline to craft a good story. A writer needs to approach the hero's journey with unique characters, different settings, and an assortment of devices to set it apart from every other hero's journey. So why not create a more specific hero's journey template? It could include all of the stock characters you need, all of the locations, and even the conversations that need to happen. Excellent! What happens after someone writes that story? Do we just keep writing the same one over and over, and just change the names?

That was pretty much what my experience with marketing copy was, only I spent far, far more time creating outlines and templates for writing pieces than I did actually writing them. It was ridiculous.

And the boss actually made a comment at one point about how marketing writing was useful, unlike fiction or something you write "for yourself." Sure thing. Deception in the name of filling someone else's pockets. I'm not sure how that's useful, since people will be pretty pissed off when our programs crash and halt their productivity.

For the sake of accountability

2008-06-09T23:51:00.004-04:00

OpenOffice tells me I just put 688 words toward a new story. It's one that I have many pages of ideas on, but no actual story. Well, now it's 688 words of story. I'm pumped. It's so worth being frickin exhausted at work all day tomorrow.

But that's a boring entry, so I'll leave a little something called "Things I Would Say versus Things I Wish I Had the Stones to Say."

The Line: "Well, it's not that we don't want to let you work from home regularly to reduce your gas expenses, it's just that we need to think about the kind of precedent it will set with other employees and how to address it before we can move forward."
What I Would/Did Say: "I understand. There has to be a real reason for it, otherwise people might get upset and bitter."
What I Wish I Had the Stones to Say: "Your existing precedent is that you don't care about any of your employees until they try to quit, at which point you realize the company is doomed without them and agree to let them work from home. So, yeah, you need to figure out how to spin that so people don't mistakenly believe you have their best interests in mind."

Sorry there isn't really a punchline in there. People do this sort of thing all the time (obviously myself included), and it's interesting to see how two completely different characters can exist as pieces of the same mind. I guess I look at it as a lesson that creating unique voices isn't as difficult as it can seem at the outset, because sometimes all it takes is a different degree of restraint to make the leap from polite guy to mister road rage.

diurnal nocturnal

2008-06-06T14:52:00.000-04:00

He sat on the edge of the ruined high rise and looked over the tangle of trees and assorted flora that twisted through the city.

Just gotta make dawn. The pale glow on the horizon made his head spin. He planted his hands on the edge of the building and took a breath.

"You look like hell." His dead brother appeared next to him.

"It's the curse."

"I think it's the number of days you've gone without sleep."

"I'll sleep at dawn."

"You really should get some rest." It was his mother now, who, as far as he knew, was still living out west.

"At dawn." He forced his chin up and his eyes wide (once more alone). The cool air briefly soothed the itching.

He'd become aware of the curse on his third day without sleep. Something overtime behind schedule a pressing project at work it was a long time ago how's she doing He had been working on something and forgot to sleep. When his boss came to tell him to take a day off and get some sleep, a tiny worm had jumped in his ear and taken control of his brain. A coworker passed by a moment later and two worms leapt from the bossworm into the other guy's brain.

He fled. But he knew the worm was inside his head saying sleep rest one moment close your eyes just relax SHUT UP He didn't want to risk letting the wiggly bastard gain control so he resolved to stay awake until

"Why dawn?" Deadbrother again.

"The curse will die."

"How can a curse die?"

"It's a..." he wiggled his index finger "thing."

"Worm?"

"Yeah."

Deadbrother shrugged. "You plan on fixing up the city or something?"

"Huh?"

"Look at this place, all overgrown. You got a plan?"

"Find survivors, I guess."

"You're not worried about getting another" Deadbrother drew circles around his ear with his finger "thing?"

He was silent for a moment. "I bet I'm immune now."

"Let's hope."

He watched the vines wind their way among the trees and up the buildings. This would be a hard fight long fight tough fight since the living would likely be cursed.

The sun peered over the edge of the world, growing taller and wider under his gaze. Come on come one come on

When it was halfway up, it stopped. After a moment, it began to sink, taking it's warmth and light and hope with it. "What the hell!" The sky grew dark again.

He jumped to his feet and shook his fist. "Get your ass out here, you bastard!"

Slowly, deliberately, a glowing middle finger rose above the horizon.

Policy and Process

2008-06-05T11:28:00.004-04:00

Effective immediately, all blog posts are subject to the new Blog Entry Efficiency Protocol. All employees are required to submit a mind dump of the elements of a successful blog entry, which will be revised until it has reached the point of maximum effectiveness. This is to ensure that all blog entries are held to the same standard and never need to be revised or rewritten in the future. This part of the process will require several hundred hours up front, but will save thousands of hours in perpetuity.

Once the necessary elements of a blog have been identified, our copywriter will begin drafting a template in MS Word which all blog posts will adhere to. This template will be passed around to all bloggers, as well as several non-bloggers, to get a varied and myopic perspective which will result in a theoretically sound blog format. This will make it possible for anyone, including people who have absolutely no knowledge of what our company is about, to write effective and communicative blog entries in a minimal amount of time and with little effort.

Each employee will be required to generate and respond to 20-40 base questions that deal with the essence of blogging, the blog template, and the ways in which the blog template will improve our overall blogging experience. After this, final adjustments will be made to the template and the productive part of the blogging process can begin.

A pre-entry entry will be required before composing a standard entry. This pre-entry is to be written in MS Word and will act as a mind dump and will serve to describe the purpose of the individual blog entry. The idea is that this pre-entry will enable the writer to to lay the groundwork for a solid blog entry. The official blog entry is also to be done in MS Word and emailed to two or three colleagues for final review before it can be posted online.

If you have any questions, please speak with someone in human resources.

Let's Try This Again

2008-06-04T22:29:00.005-04:00

This is me identifying a problem and attempting a solution.

Today a buddy of mine found out I have a blog. I mentioned that I don't write in it very often, and he said, "Aren't you a writer?"

While blogging isn't my primary interest when it comes to writing, it has proven to be a good exercise for me, so I've been thinking about why I don't write a little something every day. I came to two conclusions:
1. Having two blogs provides me with too wide of a focus, causing me to be perpetually overwhelmed by the number of things I could possibly write about, rendering me motionless
2. This particular blog, while I've been doing more and more with it, still has too narrow of a focus

Well, the first step is obvious - axe the other blog. I figure I'll use it when I need to be juvenile, or perhaps just wait until I have a purpose in mind for another blog. Anyone who read it will notice that it's now private. I know this is a sad day, but I promise you'll get over it.

Next, I had to identify what the problem was with this blog. It really wasn't that hard. When I first started it, I was basically just trying to reinterpret the concepts we were talking about in my advanced fiction class. The idea was that if I could explain them to someone else, then I had a pretty good handle on them. A couple of things have happened since then:
1. I graduated from college.
2. I started working full-time at my company, which involved a transition from programming to technical writing and marketing copy. The boss-man is obsessed with base questions, procedure writeups, and excessive amounts of useless writing, and is also constantly saying, "The best way to learn something is to prepare to teach it," with this look on his face that says, "I know for a fact that this thought has never occurred to you." I leave it to you, dear reader, to imagine how that might affect my attitude toward this blog.

This blog no longer serves the purpose it was designed for, so I've been sort of floating in limbo, throwing things up as they "felt right", and not really knowing what the hell was going on here. No more! (That phrase needs to trigger an image of a dirty peasant standing on a soapbox, surrounded by dirtier peasants, giving a huge pep talk about how they're going to ambush the local lord's guard as they escort him to his summer beach house, where he plans to carry on with the duke's wife if you know what I mean, and throw off their shackles and long-stick-things-they-use-to-carry-two-buckets-of-water and make a new life for themselves). No more! This blog is not going to be a place where I yammer about disciplined writing and theory anymore. From now on, it's a place where I live the disciplined approach to writing. I'm going to start posting. I'm going to screw with my schedule and figure out how I can post every day. It might not be good writing. It might not even reach mediocrity. But damn it I am going to practice Howard Taylor's BIC HOK technique if it kills me. Why? Because bitching about how much I hate my job doesn't bring me any closer to publication. Actually writing does.

I know, it sounds far-fetched, but I think I'm on to something.

Apparently it WAS a good idea...

2008-05-13T10:05:00.002-04:00

I found something via Penny Arcade today -- Ommatidia, a site where a guy writes 101-word stories every day. Like the silly person I am, I immediately became jealous, because I had a similar idea a few weeks ago, and here's a guy who has been doing it since 2003. "So much for that," I thought.

But that's a dumb thought. So some guy has a daily writing blog. That's awesome! Why should that I mean I can't do it? Because I wasn't the first to think of it? That's a horrible way to operate. Imagine what would happen if every person refused to do something that had been done before. There would be no new stories, no books, no movies, no music, nothing.

The kicker is that my idea really isn't the same as his. Sure, I'd shoot for daily, and definitely in a blog format. But mine would have been different. I wouldn't have wanted one-shot deals; I would have preferred a running story. I would be more lax with my word count, too: he chooses to limit himself to 101 words. I would be more lax and keep it "around 300". It would still be mine, not my attempt to steal his.

That being said, a daily writing blog isn't next on my list. I do have something in the works, and I do intend for it to be online, but I'm not ready to share yet. If I talk too much, I'll never actually act. And I want to act. I also have a lot of prepwork to do, but it's moving, and I'm hoping to launch this summer. I'm excited.

How about you? Do you ever find yourself wanting to trash a project because someone already did something like it?

Holy Crap, Reading is Awesome

2008-05-07T10:48:00.003-04:00

So I haven't posted in a while. Oops...

I had a pretty amazing experience last week. It was almost like fulfilling a prophecy, since it was repeatedly foretold by writing professors and the guides by professional writers.

Let's travel back in time first. The class that sparked my desire to write was Children's Lit, back when I was still at the community college. I stayed in touch with the professor, even volunteered on his campaign when he ran for state representative. About two years ago, he loaned me a book called "The Pooh Perplex", and I don't think I've seen him since.

My wife and I just moved last month. We live pretty close to this guy, and I figured it would be inexcusable of me not to try and get in touch with him, so I shot him an email. I also decided it was time to read "The Pooh Perplex."

Between Children's Lit and Pooh, I took a few classes, attended groups, and read a bit about the writing process. One thing that kept coming up was, "Read!" For a while, I was reading quite a bit, but once classes ended and my job started, it got harder and harder to make time. My book queue is marginally smaller than it was a year ago, which is kind of depressing. It's not that I don't want to read, it's that I tend to relegate reading to the bottom of the priority list.

I was still trying to be a writer, though, and despite the fact that I identified several weaknesses in my writing, and that I knew a little field research was in order to correct those weaknesses, I continued to put off reading. So, imagine my surprise when, one day after reading half of The Pooh Perplex, I cranked out a really good start to something. Seriously. It was good. I liked it. I have no idea if I'll do anything with it, but I was impressed at the quality. My subconscious had stolen some things from the book and incorporated it with my existing style, and the result was pleasing. I haven't looked at the beginning since that day, so I'll probably think it sucks when I do, but I'm feeling pretty good right now.

Bottom line: Listen to the writers who tell you to keep reading. It really does make a difference.

Writing Excuses (dot com)

2008-03-27T09:15:00.004-04:00

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!

Arthur C. Clarke

2008-03-19T09:31:00.005-04:00

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.

What the H are you doing, Stan?

2008-03-06T11:34:00.003-05:00

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!

Mrs. Man X to Join Sven!

2008-02-28T21:02:00.003-05:00

Yes, yes, the rumors are true! My lovely wife has decided to throw her hat into Sven's ring and write one of the stories I've been bugging her to write for the last year or so! This is good, because I'm going to be way to freakin busy to participate this time around.

Pop over to her blog and nag her!

Building the Stage: Nuravol and Soravol

2008-02-22T09:20:00.000-05:00

All right, we've got Vilhelm the Nuravol, Olwen the Vesna, and Nathanael the Soravol. We know that the Nuravol and the Soravol are rival tribes with ancient history in common, and we know that each has a "mirror" tribe on a higher plane -- the Hild and the Vesna. We also know that Nathanael was raised as a Nuravol, and that he is gone. Vilhelm and Olwen are looking for him.

There needs to be more. Well, okay, some people might think this is enough to start, and that's fine. But I live for this stuff, so I want to write some ancient history for these people.

Since this writing exercise is being contained on this blog, I'm going to keep things small and manageable, with room for expansion if I ever decide to develop things further. History begins shortly after the world is utterly devastated. A few groups of people survived, but they wound up isolated. The people in this story all live in the middle of a ring of mountains. Anyone who climbs the mountains and looks outward will see nothing but devastation, so there is no reason to try exploring. Enough time has passed that no one remembers that life used to exist in the outside world.

Inside this ring of mountains is a forest and a lake. A river runs into and out of the lake, from the northern mountains to the southern ones. For the first several generations after the crisis, the people who lived in this area were able to live peacefully. They cleared out some of the trees for farmland, built homes, and looked to the future. Eventually, economic classes developed -- people with money on the top, people with skills on the bottom. While it wasn't ideal, most people accepted it as life.

Then there was a long drought. The river grew weak and the lake level dropped. The rich hoarded water, even hiring guards to patrol the river and prevent others from drinking. Everyone else suffered. Before long, there was an uprising, and after a bloody conflict, everyone had water again. Things were relatively stable until the drought ended, when the unifying desire for free water became irrelevant and different people had different ideas of how to run things. Thus the Nuravol and the Soravol are born.

Not bad so far. The next question, of course, is where the Vesna and the Hild came from. I'll save that for another time.

Random Name #3

2008-02-15T21:39:00.000-05:00

For the record, I decided a few things about this character in advance of picking a name:

This character has some connection to Vilhelm. I'm leaning toward "last surviving family," but I'm open to other possibilities.
This character disappeared from Vilhelm's life, and he is searching for this person.
For Vilhelm, locating this character means accepting guidance from Olwen.
Olwen has a vested interest in the two characters reunion. I don't feel like figuring that out at the moment, though.
This character will be a sharp contrast to Vilhelm -- where he is strong, this person is frail; Vilhelm prefers to fight evil, this person prefers to nurture good; and so on. Seriously, it would be so boring if they were both Lawful Good!

I'm going to run the random generator at BehindtheName for both a male name and a female name, and... well, basically just pick the cooler sounding one.

Hmm.... we have VENUS and ŚWIĘTOPEŁK (Polish form of SVYATOPOLK). Not entirely digging the results... The female name gives me the first woman James Bond sleeps with, who probably gets killed 30 minutes in (it also gets that Bananarama song stuck in my head...er, what?!). The male name is cool but a tad unwieldy, but I really like the meaning -- "bright folk."

That led to me cheating and getting sidetracked. I thought "bright folk" would be great for another race, so I started looking for names that had "bright" in their meaning. Long story short, I took "Nuray" and "Sorin" and came up with the Nuravol and Soravol -- two tribes or factions that split from a single group long ago. Perhaps in a different story...

Now it's several days after my initial search, and I still don't have my third character. My wife has given me permission to look for a new name, so here goes...

Name: Nathanael
Meaning: "God has given" (Hebrew)

The website mentions a guy named Nathanael in the Bible. I looked him up and discovered "in [him] there was nothing false." Awesome. We have an honest and upstanding guy to work with. That makes sense, being that I just now decided he is best friends with Vilhelm (I think their names are too different linguistically to make sense as brothers).

How did they meet? Suppose Vilhelm is a Soravol and Nathanael is a Nuravol. Nathanael was transplanted as a child (perhaps even an infant), either because his parents were killed and he was taken, or he was abandoned in an area where the Soravol might find him. In either case, he was raised as a Soraval, but was frequently mistreated because (obviously) he looked like a Nuravol. We already established that Vilhelm has a tendency toward protecting the weak, so it was only a matter of time before he witnessed several people beating on Nathanael and came to his aid. Blah blah blah they became friends and then one day Nathanael was gone.

Olwen wants them reunited because she wants to guide them both to the higher plane and grant them supernatural abilities. The Vesna have their own tribe, and she believes that a Soravol and Nuravol working together would be able to turn that battle in the Vesna's favor.

By the way, the female name that popped up when I got Nathanael was "Hildegard," so...

Race: The Hild
Meaning: Battle

For now, anyway. The Hild exist parallel to the Soravol, while the Vesna exist parallel to the Nuravol. I'm not sure if I'd say they are allied, or just that their existences seem to line up nicely in a mystical sort of way, but that's not important now because I'm building a foundation.

The Hild are warriors. I don't mean to imply that they are "the bad guys" or anything like that, just that they take pride in physical strength. Their magic is meant to weaken their opponents or strengthen themselves. If the Soravol have a connection to the Hild, then Vilhelm is a model Soravol.

In contrast, the Vesna are less interested in combat. Their magic will be more geared toward avoiding conflict -- they would rather sneak around, making themselves invisible or confusing their enemies' senses. Nathanael isn't exactly the penultimate Nuravol, on account of being raised among Soravol, but his peaceful nature is definitely a Nuravol trait.

I think that's enough for now... I'm starting to get really pumped about where this could go.

Random Name #2: Vesna

2008-02-12T09:14:00.000-05:00

Ok, I've started some extra-curricular projects that are going to be eating up all of my free time. What that means for this blog is a whole bunch of silly updates involving random names from BehindtheName (which I still highly recommend).

So what's with the V theme? That's twice in a row I get a name that starts with the same letter. Oh well.

Name: Vesna
Meaning: "messenger" in Slavic. Name of the goddess of spring.

Hold the phone! A long time ago, I wanted a name for a race of immortals, but couldn't dig up anything satisfactory. Perhaps I'll use Vesna (or a modified form of it) to refer to them. That makes for a really boring blog, though... but I don't want to get attached to a character if I want the name to be associated with a concept. Hmm...

Name: Olwen

Meaning: "white footprint" (Welsh)

This name also comes with attached mythology. Sweet! Here we go:

Name: Olwen the Vesna; Olwen of the Vesna; the Vesna, Olwen

So we've identified a race of beings, and named one of those beings. Great! We don't actually know anything yet.

Let's start with the Vesna. We have "messenger", "goddess", and "spring" to start with. My mind always runs to "angel" from "messenger," so we'll say that Vesna are capable of interacting with two different planes of existence. Does that sound cool? I think it does. How about "spring"? That's the time of year that stuff comes to life, so perhaps their presence brings life and/or healing. Maybe grass or flowers grow where they walk. Whatever. I'll leave that as a placeholder for now and come back to it later. I will say that I don't want it to be something they control, just something that naturally occurs in their presence.

How about Olwen? "White footprint." Great! It sounds like it goes with the healing thing. What else is significant in this? White footprints would be pretty conspicuous, almost like they were leading somewhere. That means she could be a guide of some sort, or maybe a teacher (to go along with the "messenger" concept). Footprint implies that she is always walking, so she has no home.

Wanderer, healer, guide, messenger... people may follow her for a time, but her name is singular, so she is generally alone. She is always searching for someone to deliver a message or to take them somewhere. My mind keeps going to an "angel of death" kind of place with this, but I'm not entirely sure of that. Perhaps she can guide mortals into the supernatural realm. That will require further development of the duality of the universe, but I don't think that's such a horrible place to start. The next question would be how to take that idea and make it fresh. Perhaps next time...

Character: Vilhelm

2008-01-29T10:51:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-21T08:25:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-19T15:05:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-18T09:54:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-15T13:38:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-15T08:05:00.000-05:00

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?

Status Update

2007-12-17T15:39:00.000-05:00

While most people doing Sven seem to be writing more each day than I've done in the whole thing so far, I'm pretty pleased about wrapping up the first main arc of my story. I rewrote the end over lunch today, and it's much better. I'm not sure if I should press on and finish the rest of the story, or take a breather and touch up what I have a bit before moving forward.

Throwaway Drafts

2007-12-07T14:42:00.000-05:00

I don't want to use numbers for fear that they'll increase the pressure, but I will say that I've hit my goals recently and I've been pounding away at my story this week. I'm about to wrap up the first arc of the story, and I'm really excited about it.

This whole "starting from scratch" experience has taught me something that I think is valuable: the throwaway draft (should I capitalize? The Throwaway Draft?). This sort of thing gets covered in writing classes and books (in "Bird by Bird," a book I don't recommend, Ann Lamott has an entire chapter dedicated to "Shitty First Drafts"), but the idea is always "Don't worry about if it is good! Just write and fix it later!" With my next longer writing project, I'm going to approach it a bit differently -- deliberately write something with the intention of throwing it away. Maybe this won't apply to other types of writing, but for fantasy, it has been amazing. I fumbled through my first version of this story with too much of my focus on the "cool stuff" -- magic powers, non-standard environment, epic conflict -- and wound up with a lot of junk. I didn't pay enough attention to my characters, so everything that sounded cool in my head wound up being lame on the page. Nobody cares if a bunch of really boring people have cool powers and are trying to kill each other under two moons.

When I read over the story, a few months after finishing it, I hated it. I needed to get to know my characters better, so I spent some time revising them, giving them more interesting histories and real pain in their pasts that would drive them to make stupid decisions periodically. I axed some characters, brought in some new ones. Then I sat down to rewrite, and things were much better.

I have some ideas for being for deliberate about this in the future. I have no idea if they will be effective, but hey, it's worth a shot.

Babysitting
Pick a couple of characters and write a few pages of what would happen if they had to watch someone's kid(s) for an evening. This kind of exercise would separate the characters from the environment, which I think would help immensely in a fantasy story, since the environment can often be a distraction. Even though the situation would be weird, it seems like a great way to find a character's voice.

Grocery Shopping
This is similar to the first one, only I would take one character and have him or her try to pick out stuff to make for dinner. This would provide an opportunity to focus entirely on what goes on in the character's head -- how he reacts to food he hates, how he thinks about other shoppers, etc.

High School
Dear heavens I hated high school -- would my characters hate it? Would the villain shake down the hero for lunch money? Would the hero pine over Suzie in chem despite the fact that she's totally out of his league? This type of arrangement could provide benefits from the first two examples.

Visitors to the New World
Put "normal" people into your fantasy world. No, don't make them "aware" (as in, "Wow! We're in a strange land!") -- just don't make them any different than someone from the real world. This will help you get a grip on the implications of whatever fantastic element you've added to your environment to make it special, and will help you understand how your characters might need to be different to fit in properly (an exaggerated example of what I mean would be putting an oxygen-breathing human in a world that is entirely aquatic).

Obviously, revision will always be necessary, and I don't mean to imply that I'm trying to eliminate that step from the writing process. The point here is to help figure out your characters before you have to start dealing with how the events of the story change them. Notice I said "help" -- almost every time I write a new scene, I learn something about one of my characters, so I don't want to give anyone the impression that a few prewriting exercises are going to solve all of your story's problems. They won't. They're meant to provide a few more tools at the front end that will breathe life into your characters.

The Track is Below Me (you could say i'm on it)

2007-11-26T10:01:00.000-05:00

Between scheduled slacking and genuine distractions over the beginning of "the holiday season" in addition to the actual Thanksgiving weekend being totally freaking awesome, I haven't gotten much writing done. However, I'm ready to once again force life to talk to the hand while I get busy and make some progress. After a chat with my wife last night, I realized I need to completely BS my way through the part of the story I'm on and fix it later -- the important thing is to get the skeleton in place so I know what to flesh out later.

Edit: I realized I talked about a job I was going to pursue and never gave an update on that. I spent a couple of hours brainstorming and playing with the software, and basically concluded that I don't currently have the skills required for the job. I'd rather take my sweet time to get a feel for it, focusing most of my efforts on my fiction, and be capable of delivering something awesome next time a job opens up, than to bust my hump to crank out something mediocre and forgettable, while neglecting the stories that sometimes keep me awake at night. That might make me sound like a quitter, but I really don't care. If I'm going to apply for a job where I get to be creative, I'm going to make sure they get the best I have to offer.

Also, 338 words at lunch today.

70 Days, 11/13/07

2007-11-14T08:25:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm taking something of a hiatus from my WIP to put together a resume. This isn't a normal resume, oh no -- a video game company is hiring writers, and they want applicants to create modules for a game that showcase dialogue writing abilities. I'd like to get this thing sent off by the end of the week, at which point I'll be completely focused on my story again. I'm posting this so no one thinks I'm slacking off.

70 Days, 11/12/07

2007-11-12T20:25:00.000-05:00

No words today, but my wife helped me hammer out what's going to happen next, so I won't be flailing around aimlessly tomorrow. I'm pretty pumped about that.

A long, rambling entry about my writing process

2007-11-08T10:31:00.001-05:00

This was originally going to be a comment in Lynn's blog, but it got way out of hand so it's going here (context: she asked about writing process).

My first thought is to type, "I haven't quite nailed a process yet," but I have a feeling that as I type about what I do, a fairly standard process may emerge.

I have a lot of stuff sitting on my hard drive. I don't consider most of it "Finished," but I do write a lot of short fiction, so I've had many opportunities to finish a draft and revise.

My ideas usually come in the form of "a story about a person who _____." The first thing I have to do with the idea is define the world that "a person" lives in. If my idea is "real world" (i.e. a college kid who is struggling with faith), this step is pretty easy (he's at college!). When things run fantasy or sci-fi, this takes longer because I have to basically write a world history, create magical laws, and try and get into the heads of civilizations that thrived and died long before the story takes place. If this weren't insanely fun, I would probably never write fantasy :)

This is a time-consuming process because I'm basically writing a story to help me write a story (in fact, the first time I tried this, the back story became the story, so I had to write even more back story!), so I find it's best to paint with broad strokes and fill in the details as necessary. I'll catch the inconsistencies in revision (I hope).

The reason I'm so thorough is because I want to be in control of any cultural factors that would influence my characters' personalities. I would rather have something de-rail my story at this stage than when I'm attached to where I think things are going.

Once I have a world put together, I drop my characters in there and see what happens. Sometimes I start by writing up character sheets (one time, just for kicks, I actually rolled the characters D&D style), but I've found that it's easier to write those after I've had a chance to work with the characters. Every interaction reveals something about a person's personality and reflects their past, so I like to let the character sheets grow with the story before I set them in stone.

I don't really plot. I mean, right now I've got three vaguely-defined events that I think need to happen, but they're open enough that I'm not locked into a specific course of action. I keep a file called "The Next Step," which really only gets used when I'm stuck in a "boring" scene and don't want to lose my direction, but it doesn't go very far. I've found that saying, "they'll kill this guy when they run into him next" doesn't mean my characters will actually kill that guy when they run into him next -- they're much more complex than I can sum up in a plot outline, so I try not to do that when I can help it.

I've only "finished" a longer story once -- it's my current WIP for Sven, and it marginally resembles the first draft and promises to be much longer. Part of my process was seeing how bad that initial draft was and revamping everything -- story, characters, world, all of it.

Sorry if this is kind of rambly. I'm at work, so I'm writing a few sentences at a time as I get stuff done :)

70 Days, 11/06/07

2007-11-06T13:05:00.000-05:00

Words
Lunch: 212
Home: 729
Total: 941

My wife is making me write when I get home tonight, so I'll get more done. Most importantly, I managed to wrap up a scene that was driving me nuts and sorely tempting me to quit. I'm really excited about where the story is going, but this was one of those necessary downtimes that wasn't terribly interesting to write. Hopefully it is more interesting to the reader than it is to me. I always have trouble with the parts that explain the mechanics of the world, because I already know how stuff works and it seems redundant as I'm writing it, but I know the reader will probably appreciate a little more technical information so it doesn't seem like I'm just inventing magic and backstory as I go. I don't mean to imply that there is no improvisation involved, but I spent a lot of time developing the world and I think the reader should be confident that they'll be safe if they step into it.

70 Days, 11/05/07

2007-11-05T12:57:00.000-05:00

Words
Lunch: 135
Home:
Total:

My eyes hurt pretty bad today, so it's tough to focus.

70 Days, 10/27-10/28

2007-10-28T20:44:00.000-04:00

No writing -- apartment flooded. Working on that. Staying at mom and dad's tonight. Blah. Hope we can break our lease.

70 Days, 10/26

2007-10-26T13:19:00.000-04:00

Lunch: 496!

I probably won't get more done tonight, but I'm pretty pleased with what I got today. I know what needs to happen, it's just kind of a "slow" part right now, so it's tough to write. I want it to be interesting, and not just filler, but I don't quite want to just say "and then they..." and skip all of it. Maybe I'll need to do that when I revise, but I really want to chug through this and get it out because it will be a lot easier to cut than it will be to add.

Anyway, yeah, haven't been hitting my targets this week, but who cares. It's been a very busy week.

70 Days, 10/25

2007-10-25T13:17:00.000-04:00

Ok, today I decided that instead of trying to force myself to write the next scene, I would try and plot out the rest of this section of the story (I've got three sections planned, and I'm on the first). I managed to crank out 891 words over lunch. Granted, they aren't 891 "story" words, but I'm still pleased. When I sit down to hammer it out (maybe even tomorrow at lunch, since I did way more than I thought I would), it will be a lot easier to write. So...woo!

70 days, 10/24/07

2007-10-25T12:05:00.000-04:00

Lunch: 344
Home: --
Total: 344

Depressing.

I'm going to spend today and tomorrow figuring out what, specifically, needs to happen to get me to the next major plot point in the hopes that I'll be able to crank out more stuff over the weekend and next week.

70 Days 10/23/07

2007-10-23T13:03:00.001-04:00

I realized that since there are 23 built-in holidays, keeping the days numbered in my titles might get weird, so I'm going with dates now.

Lunch: 260
Home: --
Total: 260

I'll edit tonight or tomorrow, but since I'm not busy after work, I should be able to crank out a bit more once I get a nap in (I'm freaking exhausted today).

Edit: I went to bed at 8:30 last night.

70 days, day 7 and 8

2007-10-22T13:10:00.000-04:00

I didn't write anything yesterday, but that was intentional, so I don't feel bad for it.

10/22/07
Lunch: 501
Home: --
Total: 501

Tired + busy = no writing after work.

70 Days, day 5 and 6

2007-10-19T13:16:00.000-04:00

10/19/07
Words
Lunch: 551 (w00t!)
Home: --
Total: 551

I'll edit sometime tonight or tomorrow with the rest of the count, but I'm pretty pumped about today's lunch progress.

Edit: Ok, so I didn't get anything done at home. BUT, check out today:

10/20/07
Words: 988

I wasn't even planning on writing today, but while I was driving around with my wife, we hammered out the next step in the story, so I came home and wrote it.

Today also marked the passing of a significant milestone for me. It requires a story...

Back in February of 2004, I had an idea. Now, I'd had ideas before, and had even made lazy attempts at writing, but this one really enchanted me, so I started taking notes. Before long, I had written twenty pages of history, character bios, and ideas for where I thought a potential story could go. One thing I kept coming back to was this idea that the characters would have a legend about a hero named Gabriel who had done some great deed. Then, at some point, Gabriel became the story.

The first twenty pages came relatively quickly, though I took frequent breaks to play with other ideas I was having. Then, despite my best efforts at keeping hard copies of everything I wrote, I lost most of the story to a hard drive crash. I kept working on other stuff, but I couldn't bring myself to touch Gabriel.

Luckily, I had given a copy of the work in progress to a friend of mine. She found it, quite by accident, and called me to see if I wanted it back. Emphatic "hell yes!" It was everything but a chapter that I had planned to delete anyway, so I typed it all up...and didn't touch it for a long time. I was stuck.

Finally, I said "screw it," and just wrote with the sole purpose of finishing the damn story. In July of 2006, I reached an ending. The story was 14,078 words, and though I knew it was rushed, I figured I'd fill everything in on revision. I let it sit for four months and gave it a look.

It was crap. I was embarassed. I immediately began a new draft, but... I guess life just got busy. After only a couple weeks of writing, I put it down and worked on some other stuff, then stopped writing as I finished college and prepared for my wedding. I started working full-time at my job, and began using my lunch breaks to write.

In September of this year, I started thinking about Gabriel again, and all the ways I could make his story way better.

Today, when I stopped writing, Gabriel's story was at 14, 928 words -- longer than the original draft. This time I know what I'm doing -- I've taken the focus off the mechanics of the fantasy world and put it on the people who live there, and that has allowed me to flesh out a whole lot more back story than I had before. The result is that even though I currently have more text than I did in my entire first draft, I have a lot more story ahead of me because I'm no longer trying to force my characters toward the next plot point. I'm letting them inhabit their world.

70 Days, day 4

2007-10-19T07:31:00.000-04:00

Words
Lunch: 338
Home: --
Total: 338

Bleh. Yesterday was very long and I wound up sleeping for an hour and a half after I got home from work. I did babble what needs to happen next into the mini recorder (which needs an over-the-top name, since I call my laptop the Portable Writing Machine of Destiny), so today will feature less fumbling and more getting to the point.

70 Days, #3

2007-10-17T20:45:00.000-04:00

Words
Lunch: 259
Home: 217
Total: 476

Eh, not so good today... things were a bit hectic. Oh well. Better than nothing.

70 Days of Sweat Progress Update #1 10/15-10/16

2007-10-16T21:15:00.000-04:00

Monday 10/15/07
Lunch: 453 words
After work: 397
Day total: 850

Tuesday 10/16/07
Lunch: 246
After work: 513
Day total: 759

Well, that's two days in a row that I hit my target of 750, so even though that isn't really a lot of words, I'm reaching my goals. I think that's what counts, so...rock and roll!

70 Days of Sweat #2

2007-10-15T11:43:00.000-04:00

Since I need to check in on Wednesdays and Sundays with my progress, I'm also going to post here on those days. I also have a couple legit blog entries I plan to develop, so this isn't going to become the most boring blog ever.

Beginning stats
WIP: Shadow of the Mortals (this was the draft 1 title -- I probably won't keep it)
Beginning Word Count: 10,948
Day 70 Goal: 63,448
Daily Goal: 750 words
Weekly Goal: 4500-5250 (I'd like to write 7 days a week, but I'm allowing for distractions)

70 Days of Sweat

2007-10-12T10:34:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Krista mentioned something called 70 Days of Sweat. It sounds pretty great -- you sign up and people start coming to your blog to yell at you to keep writing, and you report your progress twice a week. The goal is to write 750-1500 words every day, which (sadly) is a lot more than I currently write each day, so I went ahead and put my name on the list.

Obviously this blog doesn't get updated too horribly often, but I'll make sure to check in with progress updates and maybe even more craft-related stuff if I find time.

The Mini-Recorder, aka Pure Gold

2007-09-24T10:27:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-20T12:00:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-10T07:17:00.000-04:00

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.

Writing as Exercise

2007-01-13T00:26:00.000-05:00

When I took music lessons, the one thing that every teacher had in common was this notion that I needed to practice between meetings. Of course, in the folly of my youth, I would spend the week playing Nirvana tunes, then have a five-minute cram session immediately before going in so they would think that I practiced my scales and sight reading. In the short run, it appeased my instructors, but the fact that I only practiced one aspect of the guitar made me weaker in all other aspects and set me back quite a bit.

Writing is the same way. I spent several weeks saying, "Keep writing! Write! Don't stop writing!" but that advice can only go so far before it needs to be expanded.

Every writer has a tendency to do well in certain areas and terrible in others. In my own writing, for example, I tend to do pretty good when it comes to dialogue, but when it comes to describing my setting I fall flat. It makes for a ton of work in revision, and the addition of scenic details may interfere with the dialogue I'm so proud of, which means altering that as well. It can be annoying. If I were to simply "keep writing!", I wouldn't really solve that problem because I would still tend towards good dialogue and bad description.

This is where the idea of writing as an exercise comes in. If my writing fails because I have trouble with the scenery, then I need to spend a little time writing exclusively about scenery. Perhaps that exercise is writing a story that relies heavily on various setting elements for its meaning: the main character is a bedroom that is constantly being redecorated by its teenaged inhabitant. While there may be snippets of dialogue in the story, the bulk of it would need to rely on tasteful descriptions of the room's furniture to get its message across.

But maybe the urge to write the easy stuff is too strong and derails the plan to focus on a weak spot. What then? Make it painful. If you're like me and have difficulty with setting, go find a place to sit and describe it. Look, listen, smell, touch; write it down. Find different ways to describe the same thing. Hang on to those descriptions and use them in your writing. Is dialogue your weak spot? Eavesdrop on a pair conversations and pay attention to the specific words that set them apart from each other. Bad at narration? Write about something you do every day, like eating breakfast or going to school. The point is simply to target your weaknesses with specific (if tedious) exercises.

Challenge: Identify an area of your writing where you are lacking. For one week, set aside time each day to focus on that specific area.

Bending Grammar to Your Will

2006-12-17T21:11:00.000-05:00

Every language has a set of grammatical rules that it follows. For example, in English, a simple sentence like

Jim threw the ball

can be broken into its components

subject - verb - direct object

That is the basic form of English sentences, though obviously you can add things like adjective phrases and indirect objects, and you can change the tense of the verb to present or future. We're not here for a grammar lesson, however. Today we're going to talk about the darker side of English grammar, and how to conquer it and make it your slave.

I'm sure you've heard the rule, "Never end a sentence with a preposition." Well, I'm here today to tell you that rule is bullshit. That's what we call a "prescriptive" rule of grammar - it tells us how a sentence should be composed. The subject-verb-object rule mentioned above is called a "descriptive" rule, meaning it just explains how sentences actually are composed. What's the difference? English-speakers were creating SVO sentences before the rule; the rule is merely an observation. Think about how awkward the following sentences are

Jim the ball throwing.
The ball threw Jim.

The first is out because of the word order, and the second is weird because an inanimate object acted on a person. These are considered violations of the rule because they don't actually make sense if you try and interpret them as they are - they require work to put them right. On the other hand, look what happens when you mess with prepositions

Nashville is the city from which Nancy came.
Nashville is the city Nancy came from.

No meaning is lost between those two sentences, and in fact it takes more effort to misread the second one, which violates the "rule," than it does to read it and comprehend it. I bring this up to make one major point: Go with clarity. If you think your sentence actually makes sense and you think it sounds good, don't worry about people who say you're violating a rule.

The other idea I want to convey boils down to Sometimes don't go with clarity. You have to be more careful with this because, if it is misused, you end up destroying the story. But think - what kinds of situations exist in which even rules like Subject-Verb-Object can be violated? One that comes to mind involves characters whose primary languages are fundamentally different from English, like Japanse, which is basically Subject-Object-Verb. If those characters haven't had much experience speaking English, they may occasionally put their words in the wrong order. Another example is small children - they love playing with language and seeing what kinds of things they can put together. Excited people sometimes say weird stuff, as do people who are focusing on too many things at once. Think about what kinds of grammatical idiosyncrasies your characters have and work with them when it is appropriate.

Remember, grammar serves you, not the other way around. If rules (descriptive or otherwise) interfere with the story you want to write, throw them away. You're a writer. You're allowed to do that. Be clear. If you need a character to say something unclear, just make sure you have solid reasons for it.

Challenge: Take three characters and put them in a plausible situation (airport, bus, etc). For your characters and the narrator, pick unique styles of speech. Some examples include American South, New England, Urban, Broken, Stuttering, and Whatever You Think "Normal" Is. See what happens.

Choosing the Right Words

2006-12-10T23:31:00.000-05:00

In a work of fiction, every word matters. I mean this in a very literal sense - every single noun, verb, adjective, and preposition makes a difference in the way the story is understood. "Hate" and "loathe" may be considered synonyms, but when only one of those words carries the idea of "disgust" with it, it is important that you choose the one that best fits your situation.

"Oh come on, Stan," you say, "the reader doesn't care! You're just being nitpicky." Both of those statements may well be true, but that doesn't excuse the writer from practicing precision. Imagine a violinist in an orchestra saying, "Well, I'm not in tune, but no one will notice." There is no way that would fly - even tone deaf people would consider that attitude highly unprofessional because it aims for something less than perfection. The same is true for writers. If you're shooting for "good enough," you aren't giving your work the proper attention and ultimately failing your readers.

Okay, so we've got the gloomy stuff out of the way...now what? Well, the first step, as with everything else, is "Write the damn story." Step three is going to be "Repeat step two." Step two is going to be tedious.

Start reading your work, one sentence at a time. Look at each sentence one word at a time and ask yourself two questions: 1) Is this word necessary? and 2) Is this the right word?

For the first question, you're looking at word economy. Even if you prefer a more verbose style, you still need to consider whether you need the words you choose. Take a look at the following paragraph:

The house was empty when William returned home. "Damn, where is everyone?" he muttered irritatedly to himself. He dropped the family's mail in a pile on the counter. They can sort their own mail, he thought to himself. He kicked off his shoes into the closet, then went in his room and collapsed on his bed.

That gets the job done, sure, but it needs to be thinned out. We can get rid of "home" in the first sentence because the verb "returned" implies that he lives in "the house." In the second sentence, chop "irritatedly" because William says "damn" and mutters, axe "to himself" because, well, there is no one around for him to mutter to. The third sentence can do without "family's" because a family is implied by the next sentence; "in a pile" because, again, the rest of the sentence implies what we're cutting. Italics are typically used to represent thoughts, so that can stand alone (and again, "to himself" can go because he really can't think to someone else). Finally, the last sentence can lose "off" and "in his room"; the former becomes unnecessary and the latter is implied. The result:

The house was empty when William returned. "Damn, where is everyone?" he muttered. He dropped the mail on the counter. They can sort their own mail. He kicked his shoes into the closed, then went and collapsed on his bed.

Much better! I think you get the idea, so let's move on to choosing the right words. This time, I will present you with two slightly different passages:

Allison was about to switch off her lane when yet another customer began unloading merchandise on the conveyor belt. "Find everything you were looking for?" she asked, running the items over the scanner and placing them in a bag.
The man mumbled an affirmation, watching the prices blink on the display. "Hang on, those shirts are on sale. Get it right."

And:

Allison was about to switch off her lane when yet another asshole started unloading merch on the belt. "Find everything?" she started scanning and bagging.
The man grunted, eyeing the prices on the display. "Hey, those shirts are on sale. Get it right, bitch."

The same action occurs in each passage, but they have distinctly different feels to them. This is the sort of thing a writer needs to pay attention to. Don't shrug anything off as "close enough," or you will reach a point where the story doesn't come across the way it was intended.

Challenge: Write a few sentences, then grab a thesaurus (or visit thesaurus.com) and start playing with synonyms to see how they change what you've written.

Suffering Through Revision

2006-12-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

First off, I'd like to apologize for being so late with this week's update. I blame assorted network and homework problems for this. Now, onward to this week's topic!

Revision, to many, is the least appealing aspect of creative writing. After creating characters, building an environment and breathing life into the scenario, the idea of going through and making changes seems too much like work. The whole point of writing is to have fun, isn't it?

No. The lazy person writes for fun. The writer writes because it is a fundamental part of who he or she is. For the writer, revision is something worth suffering through because it serves the end goal, which is to produce excellent - not good, excellent - writing.

Admittedly, my own revision ethic is weak, but I think I know a few things that are worth sharing at this point.

The most important thing is to let the work sit for a while after it is finished. How long depends on the length of the story - a short story may only need a week or two, where a longer body could require a few months. In the meantime, it's a good idea move on to other projects. The idea is to get your mind off your finished work so when you go back to it, you will see it with fresh eyes. What, then, should you be looking at?

Your Use of Words - I don't mean whether or not you have "proper" grammar. Have you chosen the right words for the situation? Think about the differences between words like "anger" and "rage." The basic meaning is the same, but they tend to have different connotations. Also, consider your characters' dialogue. Do the words they use reflect their personality, or does everyone say "darn it!" because you're afraid to make some of them say "shit"?

Scene and Summary - Do you spend too much time detailing your characters actions, or do you have a tendency to blast through parts of the story that could use more attention? Ask yourself, "Does this add to the story?" If you are questioning details, make sure they are relevant. No one wants to sit through a long description of a room and a lenghthy conversation if it doesn't pertain to the story. If you're looking at a summary, make sure you don't gloss over events that will develop the overall story. For example, you might tell the reader that your main guy "worked for the phone company for twenty years, only taking five sick days in that time." While that may be enough to show that the character is a hard worker, it would develop him even further to explain the circumstances around those sick days (were they consecutive? was he the one who was sick, or was it someone else? did he do something impulsive that he normally wouldn't do?).

Scenery and Symbolism - Look for objects that appear in your story and think of ways to make them somewhat consistent throughout the story. Suppose the protagonist goes to visit her mother several times in the course of the story. If the first scene includes, say, a photo album on the end table, make sure that photo album is present in subsequent visits, or else mention its absence. Show the page it is open to (if it is open). Work with these details to enhance what is going on with your story, just don't be too heavy-handed with it - keep it subtle.

Consistency - This is key. Get a notebook or new text file and take notes on what your characters say and do and what history you reveal and keep an eye on any changes that occur as the story progresses. The longer the work work is, the more likely you are to screw up your continuity - it happens. You come up with better ideas as you go, and they weasel their way in without your knowledge. That's just how it goes. Your job is to go back and fix those problems.

Revision is brutal, but you don't have to go it alone: Ask other people to read your drafts and offer their feedback. Outside input can be quite valuable in determining the story's weak points. That's not to say you should just change everything your readers don't like, you just need to honestly consider the opinions of others because they might see something that you overlooked.

So, let's recap. Revision is suffering but necessary. Don't worry too much about grammar until you've fixed problems with word choice, scene and summary, setting and symbolism, and consistency. Listen to others. The last, and probably most painful thing you'll hear today, is the last step in the revision process: rewrite and repeat. That's right, there's a good chance that you may need to start with a blank page and write the story again with the vast knowledge you gained in the revision process. Then revise it again. It may require more rewrites, but remember, it's okay to cry.

Challenge: Write a short story (keep it under five pages for this exercise). Let it sit for a day, then revise it, focusing on one area we discussed today. Wait another day, then look at a different area. Repeat until you are satisfied.

Thanksgiving Challenge

2006-11-24T22:45:00.000-05:00

This week's update is going to be short and sweet on account of the holiday. Stay safe this weekend, and don't let the leftovers get nasty.

Challenge: Think about the people you have encountered this weekend, whether it be family or the people who camped out at Best Buy Thursday night, and create some character sketches from them.

Mining For Ideas

2006-11-18T02:28:00.000-05:00

Every now and again a good idea strikes with such force that the writer feels as though they are channeling the idea from some mysterious cosmic fiction-fountain. The rest of the time, however, coming up with a good idea is a pain in the ass and can be quite discouraging. This week, I'd like to talk about the brainstorming process and how to take seemingly "stupid" ideas and turn them into interesting stories.

I've found that the best place for me to start is with a "what if..." question. This can range from something as mundane as "What if I switched laundry detergents for a month?" to something as far-fetched as "What if an extra-terrestrial being is monitoring my use of plastic knives in conjunction with buttering my toast?"

Now, it's very easy to dismiss these questions with a chuckle. After all, laundry detergent is hardly significant in the grand scheme of things, right? Right... unless you make it otherwise. Think about it: What are the differences between two laundry detergents? The biggies are color and scent, but the amount that is used could vary as could the thickness. But again, who really cares? Perhaps your clothes do.

Okay, so this is still sounding ridiculous. "Why the hell would clothes care about what detergent is used on them?" This is where things can start to become interesting. Why would they care? That is the central question, and it is the path to your story.

(In case you are wondering, there are many reasons why an assortment of shirts and pants would care about laundry detergents. Perhaps they are living entities, and some members have specific allergies, and the detergent aggrivates them. Or maybe the clothing exists in the future or in an alternate universe, and is outfitted with several nanomachines that are responsible for regulating body temperature and maintaining camoflage. The wrong detergent could cause something to glitch out, resulting in any number of strange situations.)

The main thing to keep in mind during this process is that any idea, no matter how stupid it seems, can be fashioned into something relatively interesting. It just takes some work.

Challenge: Take your dumbest idea and think of what implications it might have in the real world, then write that down.

Developing Personality

2006-11-10T23:26:00.000-05:00

A character's personality is something that develops over the course of the writing process. It's a lot like getting to know another person - it's impossible to know a whole lot about them before you've seen them in a variety of situations. In the prewriting stage, don't worry about brainstorming a full-fledged character; just stick with the basics we discussed two weeks ago - the immediate backstory and the important details of the characters' relationships with each other. Your chief concern is getting the story finished, even if it sucks.

Because it will suck, and it will most likely be due to your characters. That's where revision comes in. Your second and third drafts (and beyond) are where you start fixing things, including the focus of this week's talk: personality.

Do you have your character sketches handy? Get those out. If you had any ideas during the writing, add those if you haven't already. You should have a rough idea of what the character is like - adjectives like "angry" or "melancholy" should give you a basic filter through which all other details should pass. The next step is to take the information in your character sketch and ask, "How does this interact with the character's personality?"

Let's take a look. Suppose your character sheet tells you that your main character is bald. If he is fundamentally insecure, then he'll probably wear a hat and become defensive if attention is drawn to his head. If he's more secure, he may think he looks like a badass and try to act tough. Of course, it could be an interesting twist for a guy who is insecure about something else to think his baldness makes him look scary, so don't rule anything out without giving it real consideration.

Another thing to keep in mind are your character's hobbies, as they can be quite revealing. Think about the differences between things like collecting stamps and fixing old cars. What is it about your character that makes one hobby preferable to another? Does he have exceptional patience? Is he organized or disorganized? Is he creative or destructive? Try and imagine your character involved in different activities and see how it unfolds.

Finally, think about personality quirks - little things that bring a character to life. These can be anything from fear of clowns to obsession with the freshness of fruit. Work these idiosyncrasies into the story; the characters will be far more interesting with them than without them.

Challenge: Take a character you are working on and put them in a variety of challening situations (traffic jam, power outage, in line behind a screaming kid at the grocery store, for example) to see how he or she will react.

What Good is Prewriting?

2006-11-03T23:53:00.000-05:00

Last week's discussion of character touched on something that I think I should deal with more fully before I move on. Developing a character's backstory is just one aspect of prewriting, which is essentially "what you do before you write the story."

Before this goes too far, I want to be clear that it is perfectly legitimate to begin work on the story before stepping back and engaging in what we call "prewriting." When an idea strikes, it may do so with action or dialogue, and there is no reason to forego getting that down simply because it would be "out of order."

The main idea of prewriting is getting the rough idea out of your head and into a notebook or text file. This frees up your mind to develop the idea further since you no longer have to worry about keeping everything in your memory. And that's really the point of prewriting, to get major aspects of your story worked out at the beginning so there is less to worry about in revision.

Obviously character is one of those major aspects that needs to be addressed - personalities, backstory, physical appearance, and relationships are all things that need to be considered ahead of time to make the story believable. But character isn't the only thing that needs to be considered.

It is important for the writer to be aware of the story's setting - the locations the characters inhabit and the props they interact with. The setting has tremendous potential for symbolism, but in the prewriting phase the writer only needs a general idea of the way things are set up. For example, if the story involves three characters on a road trip, the size of the car is more important to consider in the prewriting phase than the vehicle's color or the scenery. Three people driving across the country in a Volkswagen Golf are going to behave much differently than three people in a conversion van because of space difference, but are not likely to be affected by whether the exterior paint is blue or black.

The writer also needs to have a loose handle on where the story is going. This is an area that I strongly recommend against spending a lot of time on in the prewriting phase because it is likely to undergo the most drastic changes throughout the writing process. Still, it helps to have an idea about the situations that the characters may face in the story, even if those situations ultimately become irrelevant because of choices the characters make.

Basically the point of all of this is to establish a framework to build the rest of the story around. It will make it easier to maintain consistency within the work if the world and the characters are laid out for easy reference. Ultimately, this will reduce the stress that comes with revision because there will be fewer mistakes to correct.

Challenge: Create an environment. Then create two or three characters. Write a rough outline of what will happen if those characters are dropped into that environment.

Getting Started With Character

2006-10-27T17:13:00.000-04:00

Character is a tricky element to work with in a piece of fiction, but it's the most important. The success of a story hinges upon the believability of its characters. The question, then, is "How do you write a believable character?" The answer involves a number of things, too many for one entry, so we'll just start at the beginning.

Most story ideas allow for a wide range of character types. The first step in creating your characters is to narrow your selection. Suppose you want to write about college life. That is a subject that could involve people of all ages and from any background. Get a little more specific. We'll talk about plot and setting in detail in the future, but consider those things. Who would be present and participating? If your idea involves an introductory Algebra class, you're looking at one teacher and twenty to thirty students. Let's say our idea involves four people meeting for lunch - two students, one professor, and one graduate.

Now stop for a minute. I mean it, this is important. You need to ask yourself why they are having lunch together. Your answer isn't going to be "because they are hungry," or "because they haven't seen each other in a while." Those might be the characters' reasons, and they are plenty sufficient for the reader, but as the writer you need to know much more than that. These four people need to have a reason to get together, otherwise their interaction won't be believable.

Start with the students. Make one male and one female, just for kicks. How do they know each other? One option is that they are dating. Another is that they have a class together. Maybe they are siblings who are following in a parent's footsteps. What are they majoring in? What do they want to be? Do they know yet? These are all things that will affect the way they act together and around others.

Moving along, what about the professor? Let's have a female professor. How old is she? What is she teaching? Is it what she wants to do, or did she get her Ph.D. at a time when her field was full? Have the students taken her class, or does she know them some other way (friend of family, distant relative, etc)? Know these things - again, they will affect her relationships with other characters.

Finally, the alumnus. Why is he in town? Maybe he lives there, or maybe his out-of-state company transferred him there. Or maybe he's just passing through for the holidays. How does he know he professor? Was he one of her students at one point? Maybe they are related - he could be her son, her brother or her father. Maybe they're married or divorced.

What's important in all of this is the common ground that these characters are meeting on. Obviously the college is a part of that, but it isn't enough. A writer needs to know the specific reason that the characters are being brought together. "Random chance" isn't good enough for the writer - each character has his or her own reasons for being where they are at the time the story takes place. Those reasons need to be known to the writer, even if the reader is never aware of them, because they are what make the character's presence in the story realistic.

Remember, this is their story as much as it is yours, so make sure you know who they are.

Challange: Take one or more characters from something you are working on and write a page about what they were up to ten years ago.

The Discipline of Writing Fiction

2006-10-20T23:45:00.000-04:00

The most important thing to understand about creative writing is that it requires effort on the part of the writer.

Yes, that's right - effort. In my personal experience, I encounter an increasing number of people who shy away from this notion. Writing multiple drafts, incorporating symbolism, hell, even thinking prior to sitting down with a pen or word-processor and "just writing" are repugnant ideas to some aspiring writers. They claim to struggle with writing, but when the idea of effort is put forth, they say, "I just don't work that way."

And they don't work that way. They don't even work. They have just enough innate ability that they don't feel like they need to do anything to develop it. That is wrong and it is arrogant. Writers are not somehow exempt from dedication to their craft. Athletes don't prep for marathons by sitting on their asses, musicians don't play good shows if they let their instruments sit in the attic. Why should writing be any different?

Challenge: Come up with an idea. Write it down. Keep it.