Writing for Marketing

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.

Writing Excuses (dot com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random Name #3

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.

Character: Vilhelm

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

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

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

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

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

Fear and Apprehension

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

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

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

Status Update

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

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)

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.

A long, rambling entry about my writing process

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 :)