Crime and Punishment

I recently saw an info-graphic about how long it takes to read famous books.  It's pretty interesting, but it mostly reminded me of my Crime and Punishment story.

When I was in high school, like a lot of high schoolers, we had to read Crime and Punishment.  What makes this story unusual is that we had three days to read it.  We got the book on Tuesday and had a test on it on Friday.  The reasoning for this escapes me now, but I think it had something to do with the end of the grading period, how long we spent on Wide Sargasso Sea, and the fact that our English teacher didn't really like the book that much.

So we tackled this book in indignant, panicked frenzy.  We tried to finish other homework, study for more reasonable tests before staying up late, trying to get one more chapter read, two more chapters read.  We hurried between classes so we could get a couple minutes of reading time in.  We read over lunch, in a group around a table, all of us buried in our books in silence, eyebrows pulled together and shoulders hunched.

All the teachers made fun of us.  This was terribly hilarious to all of them and they showed no sympathy at all.

I don't remember how our English teacher managed it--what she said, how she guilted us--but the level of energy and fruitless effort put into reading this thing was surreal.  We were nerds, sure, but we were math and science nerds.  And we were seniors, who had decided that previous projects weren't worth it and thrown in the towel.  Surely this was a fruitless effort and running ourselves ragged would prove counter productive.  But no.  For some reason, we were crazed to get this book read.

I got the audio book so I could listen on my hour long commute to and from school.  But looking at the box, I frowned and calculated that there was no possible way I was going to finish, even if I secretly listened through my blow off classes.

Thursday night, my friend Matt called at 8:00 with a plan.

"Okay.  I went to the video store and rented the movie.  Come over."

Normally, this would be a ridiculous suggestion since we all knew that movie adaptations from the video store were created with the sole purpose of leading lazy high school kids astray, and that the whole English department had movie night or something where they watched the adaptations and then wrote test questions to trick you into admitting you didn't read the book.  They were sneaky and were really proud of themselves for it.

But this was a desperate situation, and so far no one knew how the damned book ended.  I don't know why none of us knew about cliff notes.

"Okay," I said, said goodbye to my mother (who laughed at me and wished me luck), got in my car, and drove to Matt's house.

At Matt's house, Matt and I exchanged terse nods.  Our friend James had his book in hand, like that might help.  And Matt's father laughed at us.  We glared at him.  This was serious.

Matt's dad made popcorn, then ate it while watching us set up the VCR.

I remember it being a three hour movie, but IMDB now says it's only two.  Either way, both Matt and James fell asleep and missed the ending anyway.  When the movie ended, I explained it to them.

For those like Matt and James who don't know, there's a guy, Raskolnikov, who decides (based on divine compulsion more than anything else) to murder his neighbor and rob her.  He kills her with an ax, then freaks out, kills her sister too when she catches him, then flubs the robbery part and only takes like $20.  This much we had all managed to read.  The guy spends the rest of the novel wracked with guilt--a guilt that burns and builds and eats away his sanity.  He's pursued by a detective who knows he did it because he's the most suspicious, guilty person on earth.  There's drama involving a sister and a prostitute with a heart of gold, and in the end the guy turns himself in.

Matt and James were disappointed with my synopsis.

The next day, we slouched into English class, curling in on ourselves in guilt, ready to face the music.  No one pulled out their book to try to read one more page.  We sat in silence and waited for our teacher to come.

I looked around, so overwhelmed with spending every spare moment wrapping myself in this story, and thought, "We are all Raskolnikov."

"Alright!" Ms. McDonald said, clapping her hands and taking her place in the middle of the room.  "What'd everyone think?"

Silence.

Silence.

"We didn't finish."  Someone said it.  We all said it.  Heads in hands and slumped into desks.  Tired eyes giving up and flagging in defeat.  We confessed.  We surrendered.

Ms. McDonald smirked.

We are all Raskolnikov.

And none of us had finished the book to realize it.

World Building Over-share

I said last time that I wanted to talk about unnecessary world building, so we can kind of think about this as a Part 2 of that rant.

Sometimes authors do world building that just isn't necessary.  I once heard the advice that when you're editing, any scene in your story should do two things (plot development, character building, setting the scene, etc), and if it's only doing one thing, you should cut it.  I like to think of world building the same way: if the world building isn't supporting the plot or characterization, then it's superfluous.

So for example, let's talk about languages.  Let's say there's a character that speaks a fictional language.  Now, this could do a lot of things to help plot and characterization.

• It could highlight cultural differences between the character and the people she has to interact with who don't speak the language.
• It could be a point of contention between the character and her mother.  The mother wishes our character spoke the language of her people, while our character is rejecting that culture.
• It could be a plot point in that two characters can communicate in secret to plan their escape from the villain's clutches.

However, if it doesn't do anything else besides "be there" or get a response of "well, that's kinda different, I guess", then it's it's only there because the author wanted to make up a language. 

And there WILL BE things in world building that don't help the plot or characters. 

Did you know, that in this alternate history story I'm writing, Thomas Jefferson didn't invent the hideaway bed???  How unusual!  I'm clever!

But does this fun fact in any way affect the story I'm telling? 

No.

Well, then there's no need to mention it.

You can, in fact, not mention a lot of things.  As long as your reader is not left wondering about them, you're good to go. 

Where did the first vampire come from?

Who cares?

That's not important to the story.  What's important to the story is the current culture of vampires and how they live their lives and how their presence affects the world around them.

We can black box that and no one will question it.

 
And this brings me to the main point I want to make: over-sharing the world building to the point that the story no longer makes sense.

"The Maze Runner" by James Dashner is a good example of this.  Now, usually I don't like saying negative things about books I've read, but this is a New York Times Best Seller and it has a movie in production, so my criticism on my little blog will not hurt anyone.  (Also, I'm about to spoil the end of this book, so turn back if that bothers you.)

In this story, kids appear in a labyrinth with no memory of who they are or what they need to be doing, and subsequently try to escape.  The world building of the maze is wonderfully done.  It's eerie and pervasive and everything you'd want out of world building.  The kids build a society for themselves, which is flushed out an organic, and catches art my attention because even though they bicker with each other, there are no pig heads on sticks.  The maze changes every night, and the monsters that wander the maze are really interesting.  The kids don't know why the maze is there or why they're in the maze or if there even is a way to get out.  It's a great book up until about the last chapter.

Then the mystery of the maze is reveled with further world building that makes absolutely no sense and spoils everything that has come before.  We learn that the kids were put into the maze because a solar flare (what?) caused the Earth to go post apocalyptic (what?).  In an effort to get the best minds working on the project, some scientists gathered the best and brightest children, educated them, and then gave them all amnesia and put them in a maze (what?), because when they made their way out of the maze, they'd be smarter and more prepared to tackle the problem of solar flares (what?).  What's even worse is that very few children survive to get through the maze, so several of their best minds (kids who found important solutions to problems within the maze) were killed off and could not contribute later to the solar flare problem.

This last bit of world building has so much that isn't working for it.  1. The science is just bogus.  2. It comes out of nowhere and is completely unrelated to the story I'd just read.  It's tonally jarring at the very, very end.

3. The response to the flare makes no logical sense.  There is no natural progression from "get smart kids to work on the problem" (which sounds good to me) to "put them in a deadly maze with amnesia."  No.  That is not even remotely a solution to the problem.  It makes the maze overly contrived, I don't see how it gives the kids better skills to solve their problem, and it drastically thins their pool of genius children even though they've learned from the maze that they do best pooling their intelligence an working together.

And 4. the world building is purely there for exposition.  It does not give us a better insight into the characters (because none of them remember this) and it doesn't even really help the plot.  This did nothing to support the story, and instead caused massive problems. 

I would have greatly preferred it if the "why" of their presence in the maze was left a mystery, if it were black boxed in the same way as "where did the first vampire come from?"  They could leave the maze into a white light, and the book could end ambiguously, and I would have loved this book.

World building done well: what we can learn from Tolkien

And we're back!

I've been having this ongoing feud (with fisticuffs and harsh words) with a friend of mine about world building.  My view of it is "If you're writing speculative fiction, you better be thinking about world building.  Reading lazy world building is one of the worst things ever."  His view (as far as I can tell) is "Thinking about world building is not what I like about writing.  Some people get carried away with it.  And I am disdainful of the whole thing." *

Which is a completely valid point.  Not liking something doesn't mean you're not going to do it on a finished product, and we all have our favorite and least favorite parts of writing.  And, yes, some stories get carried away with unnecessary world building, which I'm going to talk about in a later blog post.

But let's talk about why it's important, and what good world building can do for your story.

One of the great examples of world building, because there's just SO MUCH of it and because it's done really well, and often the first example people think of when talking about world building is The Lord of the Rings.  Now, I'm in no way saying that you have to do as much world building as this in order to have a good speculative story.  I'm saying that it does a lot of stuff right, and we can learn from it.



First of all, it's pervasive.  The history and culture of the different peoples of Middle Earth is sewn into every scene.  I've talked before about what a difference this makes, but it never hurts to have another example.

“It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.”

What do any of those words even mean?  So many proper nouns to parse through.  But the cool thing is that I don't really need to know.  It says, "This one group of people say this sea sounds like music, and it's kinda eerie," but it hints at a deeper history. 

• There is "the Music of the Ainur" which must be recognizable and unique enough to be singled out in this description, and we can get some idea of what it must sound like if it sounds kind of like a roaring sea.   
• "It is said by the Eldar" means that the Eldar have enough culture to have their own stories or proverbs or sayings.  They say this.  Other groups don't really.  And is there more to them saying this?  Is there a story there?  It implies something deeper.

Secondly, history set up in world building directly affects character's motivations and actions.  Part of the world building tells this story that back in the day, the king of Gondor and his descendants went into hiding because Sauron was after them.  This left the kingdom of Gondor without a king, so a steward took over and led the people, and his descendants have been ruling ever since.  Okay?  hat's the world building.  Now, that's all well and good, but what makes it great is that this event has direct reprecussions for characters in the main story.

When Aragorn (who is of the line of kings who went into hiding and is therefore heir to be King of Gondor) shows up, Boromir (who is next in line to be Steward of Gondor) says, "Hell no, you're not our king.  We haven't had a king in centuries.  The stewards have ruled over Gondor while you were off dicking around.  You've lost your claim, so GTFO."  Which makes perfect sense!  He's kind of a jerk about it, but he's got a valid point.  And his take on this issue reflects the point of view of a large portion of the people of Gondor.

On the other hand, there's Boromir's brother, Faramir.  He says, "The Stewards are stewards, and their job is to take care of things while the king's away.  That was the deal in the beginning, and the noble thing would be to keep his seat warm, take care of the people, and hand power back when the time comes and the king returns."  This makes sense too!  And again, it's the same point of view as a good chunk of the population of Gondor, who are like "Huzzah!  The king has returned!"

Now, what we can take from this is that this event from the past as part of the world building 1. informs the characters decisions in the main story of the book and 2. highlights differences in the two brothers' personalities.  That's great world building.




* He probably wouldn't start a sentence with a conjunction.  But it's my blog, so eat it!

BYOT XVII

Once again, Bring Your Own Theater graced my life this weekend.  Once again, it was amazing and given life by so many talented, brave, beautiful people.  And once again I wrote a ten minute play in a couple hours and then taught math to elementary school kids the next day while exhausted.  The kids didn't notice. 

I was concerned this time because I felt as though I didn't flush out the characters as much as I would have liked.  I don't think I differentiated them as much as I could have, and that's something I prided myself on in previous plays. 

This play was a different beast.  The heart of the story was driven more by the situation than by the characters.  And I really wanted none of the characters to learn anything or grow or change, so then of course, none of them did.  I think because of that, it felt shorter.  Snappier.  Less of a pivotal moment in a character's life and more of a stupid thing that happened once.

Which, I've decided, is fine.  It worked.  The actors and director were amazing and they did brilliant things.  The ending I'd written was weak.  I knew it was weak.  But they made it work, given great stage direction decisions and a change of props.  Also, when the father was telling one of his many stories, the kids would mouth along with him, doing the same hand gestures as if they'd heard it a million times before.  Brilliant!  That gave it history and tied the characters together.

So now that I've alerted you to all the nit-picky things I don't like, here's the script for you to read!  Enjoy.

mini NaNo

I love National Novel Writing Month (NaNo).  I love the weird, weird things people say on the forums.  I love the charts of your progress.  I love how people who've never written before will go, "Yeah!  I can write a novel!" and they'll fly with that confidence for at least a few days.  The word count part isn't hard for me, and I always have some idea of something to write.

So it took me a while to realize why I so often "fail" at NaNo.

It's the "all new content" part that trips me up.  I have to be writing constantly, or I feel like I will explode.  So the stars have to align where one project ends on Oct 31st so I can start another on Nov 1st for NaNo. 

This is the problem I had last year.   I was pretty close to done with edits on a previous novel when NaNo rolled around, and I put those edits on hold to write something new.  I got about 30,000 words into it, then missed my old project too much and had to go back to it.  At the time, I said that I'd said everything I wanted to say with the new project, and it just ended up not being 50,000 words.  But I'm now thinking that was an excuse to not abandon my baby. 

I want to do the Chicago Center for Paranormal Support story for NaNo this November, since I haven't made all that much progress on it.  But the reason I haven't made much progress is because I've been distracted by a stupid, useless novel that's like a big, guilty pleasure. 

I need to finish it before November.

And I figure that I don't really have 50,000 words left to write on this thing, and I do have a full month.  So let's mini NaNo this sucker! 

The problem though with this is that I write out of order, and getting chapters that are half written in shape means that I'm actually adding very few words to my word count total.  I'm in that quilting and ironing phase, making sure things I wrote a while ago still work, that I haven't repeated myself, that they flow together.  Wednesday, when I started mini NaNo, I made loads of progress, spent three hours on it, and then checked how my total word count had grown.

...I'd added 500 words.

It looked super, but still.  500 words?  If time and word output are proportional, to hit 1,666, I'd have to work for like 9 hours.

So to fix this, I'm looking chapter by chapter, and seeing how much of it I've got in shape from the beginning to where I have the first gap that needs filling.  Suddenly, I wrote so much more!  I'd been working long sections into place, and once one's in place, that's like 1,000 words right there. 

And this is how I'm spending October: trying to get this thing done.  Follow along with the #miniNaNo tag on my twitter.

Write for Twenty Minutes

Recently, there was a discussion on NaNoWriPod (check it out on iTunes) about how to split up your writing time to encourage productivity.  If you write for an hour, are you really writing for an hour?  Or are you writing for thirty minutes, then puttering around for thirty?

My favorite recommendation for this is a method called "20/10s."  You work for 20 minutes (setting a timer) then take a 10 minute break (setting a timer) then repeat as needed.  Now, this method comes from UnFuck Your Habitat a fantastic site designed to help you clean your house.  The idea is to avoid marathons--hours of non-stop cleaning--and instead break it into reasonable chunks.  You don't realize until you try it how much you can clean in twenty minutes.  I often recomend this method to my students (without telling them where it came from because avoiding profanity outweighs the failure to site my sources.)  They can study for 20 minutes, then take a break, then come back and study more.  That way they don't end up staring at their text books, zoning out and not not really benefiting.

It ties into another theory when it comes to studying: separate your work and your break.  By keeping them disconnected (I mean physically.  Move to a different space) you're more ready to switch into work mode when you sit down to work.  You're also more forgiving of yourself when you take breaks.  You don't have to think, "Oh no.  I'm not working.  I'm so bad," because you can think, "Okay.  Here's my 10 minute break and then I'll get back into it."  It helps you work harder, and party harder!

The problem is, that in any of these situations (cleaning, studying, writing) you might get to the end of 20 minutes and think, "I can't stop now.  I'm on a roll.  This whole scene has unfolded before me and if I stop I'll lose my momentum."  And that's fine!  Don't stop.  Do what you want!  The point is to give yourself permission to stop when it gets hard.  Don't force yourself to work for two hours.  Force yourself to work for twenty minutes, which is completely doable.

My second favorite recommendation is Write or Die.  You set a time limit and a word count goal, and just type, type, type.  If you stop for too long, the background turns read, and then there are horrible noises until you start writing again.  I works really well for just regurgitating stuff, but not so well if you want to stop and research things, or read over what you wrote, or edit, or talk on g-chat.  But, boy howdy, I can get 500 words down like nobody's business.  I like the "old and busted" version because it's free and looks simpler and I really don't need a bunch of fancy options.  Also, I need to remember to turn off the sound on my computer when I work at coffee places.  For me, the red background is bad enough.

And it works really well with 20/10s!  Or, in this case, 30/10s, because you can't set the timer for 20 minutes.

Now, a lot of people hate Write or Die.  I can understand.  For me it works really well.  So if you're more in the mood for positive reinforcement, there's Written Kitten, which gives you a picture of a cat for every 100 word you write.  Actually, you can set how many words will give you a picture.  It's pretty cool, but not as motivating for me.

Talk it out

A few days ago I had the opportunity to talk to a friend about what I was writing.  Now, I talk about what I'm writing all the time.  "I'm writing an article about such and such."  "I'm writing a novel.  There are werewolves.  Right now I'm writing dialogue."  "I switched to first person today.  Here's a blog post about it!"  But I don't often get into the nitty gritty of plot problems.

I was sitting in the coffee shop, scowling at my computer and dramatically sighing and groaning--not really looking for attention, but if there's someone at the table with you, you can make noises without the people at other tables giving you the side eye.  But it (obviously) caught the attention of my friend across the table, who asked me what my problem was.

"This fight scene isn't working."

And instead of "Ah...Well...Power through?" he said, "But you're good at fight scenes!"  And then he asked me questions about it, and I started explaining details. 

What I generally do in this situation (and what I'm going to do for you) is to be vague.  I was having trouble because I needed to hit a balance between way too easy for our heroes and comically ridiculous to the point that they'd never survive.  This doesn't seem like it would be too hard, but it felt like if I made it difficult enough, the action went on too long.  Maybe I needed something to mix it up?  Maybe I needed to make the mission easier, but have there be more henchmen?  Less henchmen?  How many henchmen can I reasonably get away with before this place turns into a clown car?

But the other day, I just explained what was happening in the scene.  "Dude A is doing X, and they have to keep the hordes of bad guys from killing them while he finishes."  And we talked about it, and it was great.  I didn't have all the answers when we were done with our brief conversation, but I had the start of a plan, and I felt better about the whole thing.

The other benefit was that I had to verbalize what the problem was, making it clearer in my head and easier to approach.

A lot of people don't like to talk about their writing, because if they explain it, they lose interest in writing it.  I don't have that problem, but I'll often not talk about my work because I'll get embarrassed half-way through the conversation and I'll back out saying, "I'll figure something out."  Then other times, I don't want to bore people when I know my verbal presentation of a situation won't be nearly as good as if I have it written down.

But I think there's something to be said about brainstorming with another person.  One of my favorite things about he "post as you go" method of publishing stories is that you get immediate feedback.  People will often tell me where they think the story will go, or what they hope will happen, or "don't you dare do this!"  I don't take their ideas and write them without changing them, but their thoughts will often spawn something.  They'll light a fire that burns into something unrecognizable.

Fun with Auto-Suggest

We use my computer at Ink & Blood tournaments.  The contestants type on it, and whatever is on their screen shows up on a television so the audience can see the story as it's written.

The bad news is that my Open Office is really fond of auto-suggest.  And its auto-suggestions are based off of words that are commonly used on it.  Which means that the audiences for Ink & Blood tournaments can probably figure out what I've been writing recently.  Embarrassing!

Some fun ones:

• werewolves
• dingus 
• exasperated  
• booty-call
• needs-anger-management

It suggests a lot of hyphenated phrases.  I've been putting off looking to see if I'm actually using them correctly (probably not, but that's what a rough draft is for) but this auto-suggest thing might mean I should move it up the to-do list.

I'm not sure how a word gets put on the auto-suggest list.  I'm sure I could investigate, but the mystery is kind of exciting.  And I have figured out how to turn it off, which I will at the next Ink & Blood event.  And I've figured out how to remove words from the list. 

But why would I?  It's not particularly helpful, because I don't look at my screen when I type.  (My gaze hovers above the B key no matter what I'm typing, and I can't type unless I'm looking at it.)  And--like I said--it's embarrassing.  But it's also kinda funny.  And if I can't laugh about how I'm writing enough about werewolves for my computer to pick up on that fact, then I don't deserve to be writing about werewolves.  And there's something to be said with being exasperated with how many things in my stories are exasperating and how many characters are exasperated about those things.

React and Reveal

There's this idea in film where you show the reaction of the characters before you reveal what they're reacting to. 

• Our hero stares in wide-eyed horror as the camera pans to film him from a high angle.  
• Cut to the giant monster that has risen to loom over him.

• Our hero walks out to the parking lot.  He stumbles.  His face falls.  "No, no, no, no, no," he says.
• Cut to show that a piano (which we'd previously seen in preparation to be hauled into a third floor window) has fallen on his Honda, crushing it in a mess of twisted metal and broken glass.

•  Our hero's face falls into the most beautiful smile.  He's speechless.  He's tearing up.
• Cut to his daughter, who isn't dead after all!

This puts an emphasis on the emotional aspect of the reveal.  It tells us specifically what this event means besides a cool effect or a plot twist.  Furthermore, it sets us up to expect something great.  "This is going to be something shocking.  Oh my God!  It is!"

Once this trick was pointed out to me, I realized that it translates to writing as well, and I realized that I've been using it.  In the first sentence there will be a character reaction.  The sentence afterwards, I'll tell you why.  "He opened the refrigerator, and stumbled backwards with a yelp.  Something horrible had happened to the beer, leaving the fridge a mess of sticky brown liquid, froth, the remains of exploded aluminum cans, and the smell of hops."

So I've been thinking, "Neat.  That's a cool thing," and left it at that.  But I'm bringing it up today, because I read a book the other day that did this trick and it didn't work.  Basically, what happened was that the characters would react.  They would react some more.  They would talk to each other about what this meant.  They would argue.  Then a page and a half later, we'd be told what had happened.  It was too long a delay.  I would be confused during the characters' discussion because I didn't know what was happening who whose side I should take.  The suspense didn't last as long as I think the author intended, so my sitting on pins and needles wore off and didn't last through the whole thing.  Instead I was just waiting to get through it so I could know what happened.  But then, by the time they'd gotten around to explaining and no one had died or anything, I knew that it wasn't the most important thing ever.  I didn't even really care what had happened.  Or I cared much less than I would have.  Let's say that.

It's pretty interesting to see these tricks stretched to their limits, it gets me thinking about where those limits are.

That Big Table at Starbucks

There's something about the big table at Starbucks.  The one with the power outlets, where you sit with strangers.  It's like a magnet for sketchy people.

The best story is still the guy that sat down across from me without ordering coffee and ate a chicken sandwich from Arby's.  He then stared at me for twenty minutes.  I kept typing.  Then he reached out, ever so gently, and stroked the back of my laptop.

And I kept typing.  Because what can I say to that?  I could smile and ask with endless compassion, "I'm sorry, could you not touch my computer, please?" I could flip the table and scream, "What the hell, dude!?"  I could run away and be shaky and afraid for the next hour.

Or I could sit there.  Because I have as much right as him to sit at that table (I actually had more right, because I was a paying customer.)  So I sat there for another 20 minutes, not letting anything show, and finished off the scene I was writing before hookin' it.

Probably not the best way to handle it, but I convinced myself at the time that I'd won.
The other day I had a student in Evanston, and I figured I could go early, miss the traffic, and then spend a couple hours in a Starbucks up there.  For the first hour, it was fine.  I sat next to a guy with a latte and an iPad he propped up with his wallet, who minded his own business. I got a chapter written, even though it needed some pretty serious editing.

I was going to take a break and read a short story a friend sent me, before I went to work on edits for my chapter.  The guy with the latte packed up and left, and then a woman sat down at the table.

And for a while I thought she was on the phone, maybe one of those ear piece/blu tooth things, and I kept surreptitiously leaning to the side to see if she had one just out of sight.

She didn't.  She was just talking to herself.  Which is completely fine with me.  I talk to myself all the time, and I have a certain level of respect for people who will do it in public.  Like the guy at New Wave who sings.  (Thank you for sharing your song with us, Guy at New Wave.  You have a lovely singing voice.)

But this was not something that could be tuned out, something that faded into the background, and added to the white noise I surround myself with at coffee shops.  Even though the tone was the same, the content snagged like burrs.  She talked about slicing.  And snapping.  And his blood would drip.  And she would make a feast of a man's heart. 

Her words were violence and menace and the sneaking suspicion she was describing the other patrons. 

I packed up, ducked out, and read a novel for a half hour in my car.  I don't think I won that one, but I don't really know what winning would look like.

Project Time: Perspective Shift!

I'm changing my latest novel project from 3rd person to 1st person.  This isn't as big a production as it sounds because I haven't written all that much.  Actually, making serious changes like this makes me feel far less guilty that I've done so little.

I decided to do this for a couple of reasons.

1. First person gives it a stronger voice
2. Exposition sounds more natural

It's always funny to see what improves when you change the perspective and what gets lost.  Mostly, it's improving, because instead of "She did this because of reasons" I can say "I do this because of reasons and no one ever appreciates how awesome I am I for doing it."  Now there's emotion attached to it, and personalized backstory.  It's like personalization on an info dump.

On the other hand, I had a situation that lost something.  When it was in third person, the sentence was "August dove for the phone before Chelsey could answer it."  But now that it's from August's point of view, August would never admit that she dove for a phone.  Hell no.  She's way too cool to physically throw herself on anything.  And she's way too prideful to admit she did, even if it did happen due to some wildly outlandish situation that probably won't ever come up again.

So basically, I'm dealing with an unreliable narrator and I'm finding that the experience I have with unreliable narrators doesn't translate like I thought it would, which is an interesting subject in itself and worth further investigation.  What makes this different?  What skills can I take from what I've done before?

GPOY

One of my favorite things when reading, is when I see my experience reflected back at me, and I say, "Yes!  This is exactly what it's like."

I love it on small scales.  A comment about how old socks have stretched so now the hole in the heel is up around the ankle.  A note about the cheap, boxed cookies that some grad student brought for after the guest lecture.  The way the night sky is sometimes pink from light pollution, or the way the CTA guy pronounces "Balbo" like he's a little surprised.  Mentions of families taking pictures in the wild flowers on the side of the highway.  Any mention of fixing a bra with tape or pliers.

It validates my experience.  It celebrates these images that make up my life.  It makes me feel less alone, because someone else has seen these things and felt these feelings.  (And here we could get into a big essay on why representation is important.)

I've talked before about how details make the story breathe and draw the setting up around you.  But I think it's not only that the experience seeps into the details, that these details exist, but also the way that these details are presented.

I enjoy it most when they're presented like it ain't no thing.  It's just how it is.  It's so entrenched that the characters, the narrator, and the reader all take it for granted.  That's why it's so stunning when it's presented to you.  You realize that, yes, that's how it is.  That's this small part of my life spelled out in words, and I've never thought of it before, but I've always known it. 

Which makes it a little tricky.  It's mentioned, and the very act of mentioning it means it's important or gives it "significant presentation."  But if too fine a point is put on it, if it's explained too thoroughly, or presented like "Let me tell you about this thing that you don't know, even though you already know it, because I clearly know it better," it doesn't work.  I get incensed or offended or my suspension of disbelief is ruined. 

It reminds me of that time that I didn't laugh at this guy's joke about Babe Ruth (because it wasn't funny) and he went on to explain to me that Babe Ruth was this famous baseball player.

Dude.  Just no.

I got on a friend's case about this the other day in a story of his I was reading.  I didn't realize how big a deal this is for me until I'd written a page log, ranty response to a sentence he wrote.  It got me thinking about what makes these details work and what makes them not work, and I've come up with two rules for how to warm my heart strings when it comes to presenting real life situations that I have experienced.

• It has to be presented with the same level of acknowlegement that I give it when I encounter it.  So if I don't really think about it, but the character or narrator makes it into a big deal, I'm going to think they're new here.
• It has to be presented with the same level of respect that I give it when I encounter it.  Some things I meet with fondness and nostalgia.  Some things are irritating, but a fact of life, so what are you going to do?

 So clearly, this means that something I find a perfect representation of my experience might mean absolutely nothing to someone else.  Something that falls flat for me might resonate with another person.  You can't please everyone because not everyone has had the same experience. 

Except when I hit just that right note in my writing, when someone tells me "you nailed what I've never been able to put into words," it's the most amazing thing.  It's something to strive for.  It's the heart of all writing.

BYOT XV

Friday and Saturday was BYOT XV: Catchy Subtitle, the 24 hour play project where teams are assigned, themes are given, writers have 12 hours to write, and then actors and directors have 12 hours to practice before the big show.

I wrote again this time.  Our theme was "frenemies" and we ended up with three male actors, the idea of showing how guys can also have frenemy relationships, and the idea that we could subvert tropes about masculine friendships.  Coming out of our initial, brief brainstorming session, I was terrified that I had no idea how to do this in the time given and that these guys were all going to think I was an idiot.  Also, I was trying to do too much in a ten minute play and have it all have an emotional kick.  But in the end, I just sucked it up and wrote my ideas, and it came out to 10 pages, and I decided that would have to do.

And it worked!  I don't think I captured completely what our group was going for, but I gave them a foundation and then the guys accomplished it with their body language and the staging.  They took these parts and made them full characters.  They made a meal of this script.  It was amazing, and I felt so awed and relieved.

The plays were recorded, and will be up on the YouTube page at some point in the future, at which point, I'll put the video up here.  (Speaking of which, the post about the last play I wrote, "Put a Ring on It," has bee edited to include the video.)

Below the cut is my script for the lazily titled play, "The Snake." Enjoy

The Brilliant Joy of Writing Out of Order

The most fun I've had writing, I wrote out of order. I'd think about a scene, get really excited about it, and when I sat down to write it, the words flow, like pouring coffee into a text document. A scene with lavish imagery. A neat bit of introspection. The big reveal! The first kiss! A single line of dialogue that's going to be hilarious. I write what I'm excited about writing, and then the writing is fun. I get the idea out of my head and onto paper before it slips away or loses itself in the mess of scenes that have gone stale in my head.

Now, this means that my most recent project, as fresh and new as it is, is as much of a mess as you can make in an Open Office file. Let's take a look at what I have:

• A two line synopsis. I like the punchline, but the setup needs some ironing before it really works. Why did I write a two line synopsis? Beats me!
• The first chapter, which is in decent shape and a decent length. I could end it where it is, but I think I can add a section about curly fries, and if you ever have the opportunity to add a section about curly fries, you should.
• Four blank lines, the phrase “fight with knives?” and three more blank lines. This is kinda funny, because I think there's going to be a whole other chapter before the fight scene, but I didn't bother leaving myself a note for that. Also, four cartridge returns seems a bit excessive.
• Three lines of ominous forewarning that the twist is coming, followed by a joke.
• Followed by The Twist. These two pages will probably have a chapter break in the middle because it's all “dun dun DUN!” and then abruptly changes tone.
• Seven pages of dialogue from the next dozen or so scenes in no particular order.
• An unordered, unannotated list of nicknames that I came up with while driving. These nicknames are various levels of appropriate, and I'm not sure who I was describing or who was saying the name “Peach Pit.”
• Descriptions of people standing or sitting too close to each other.

So, of course, this process involves a lot of going back over what I've already written to find out where the next scene I want to write fits. But I don't think of this like a bad thing, because each time I read through a section, I can clean it up and make it sharper or leave myself a note that it's not really doing what I want it to do. (Kind of going back to this post.) And, yeah, this goes against the idea to just vomit out everything until it's all there, but I've decided that method doesn't work for me completely and I need to do some revisions just to keep myself sane and keep myself excited about what I've written.

When I was writing Immortal Queen, I did this thing called “prompt bingo” where I would make myself a bingo card filled with one word, random prompts and when one of them spoke to me, I'd write that scene, cross off the box, and eventually get five crossed off boxes in a row and get a bingo and feel accomplished. Eventually, I had a file full of scenes that were roughly in order without transitions, and together I could see the structure of the story.

Of course, then I had to go back and string them together with things like transitions (ick), but I find that if I actually get to the point in a project where it's time to insert these transitions, I'm A. so close to having something ready to go that I don't mind writing them anymore, and B. in a place where I can figure out how to arrange the structure to not write the boring parts. (Because if it's boring to write, it's boring to read, so don't write boring things.)

I've got a few friends who prefer to write in order, and they have really decent reasons for doing so. One is that if you write in order, the narrative can surprise them. It's like driving down a road in the dark with just your headlights to guide you. You can only see so far ahead. But that doesn't work for me because I usually start a story with the climax in mind, and I really want to get to that point. If I start at the beginning and work my way to the climax, that removes the point of letting the narrative surprise me, it can sometimes take a bit of narrative acrobatics and questionable character intentions to get to the scene I have in mind, and I have to wade through boring bits I don't care about in order to get to the thing I really want to write. I lose steam, and then the project dies.

The other good reason I've heard to write in order is that that way the characters grow naturally. Their evolution feels organic. But I generally have a character arc in mind and I'm pretty good at pinpointing where each scene is in an arc (because this is a talent I have, and you bet I'm going to brag about it). Aside from that, once I have a bunch of scenes in order, I can iron out the character arc and fix anything that's out of place. I can make adjustments, and those are fun adjustments to make. (So maybe this isn't really a skill I have, and I'm just pretending it's a skill, but actually a result of hundreds of hours of editing so you'll think I'm naturally talented and then be impressed with me. Have I impressed you? Haha, don't answer that. Of course I have.)

Your Preteen Should Read Hemingway

I wrote an article this week about getting your preteen to read when your preteen hates reading.  It's really a shame that it was such a short article, because I could have gone on and on. 

When I'm writing an article, I like to poke around first and see what other people are writing in their articles that hit the same topics.  I want to make sure I'm not repeating what's already out there (as much as that's possible), and I want to see the state of the conversation which I'm entering.  But this week's article took me by surprise because so many of them revolved around the topic of "What to do when your boy child hates reading."

From just reading the titles, my interest was piqued.  I usually hear about how girl children decide they hate science and math.  This is especially prominent once they hit middle school and suddenly there are all sorts of social pressures that tell them they shouldn't be good at math anymore because this is a masculine thing and they need to be focusing on feminine things.  (Like...pants?  I was very concerned with finding the perfect pair of pants in junior high because I thought they'd make my ass look awesome and get me a boyfriend, and I had this idea that that was a thing I wanted.  But now I'm thinking about it, "pants" aren't really that feminine of a thing.)  It's pretty clear that this decision to hate numbers and graphs is a product of indoctrination from societal forces and not because the girls are particularly bad at math (with their girl brains and their...nail polish? Nail polish makes you bad at math, right?  The fumes?)  So I thought to myself, Oh! Is there a similar effect on boy children who decide in junior high that it's not cool to read because our culture has decided that that's a feminine characteristic?  How fascinating!

But no.

That is not what these articles were about.

They, in fact, just fed the monster, not mentioning (until I dug deeper on a second go around) that there are societal pressures, and thereby ignoring that they exist and what the real problem here is.  Almost all of them encouraged parents to find books about trucks and sports and "not girly" things, because MAN FOLK READ MAN BOOK!  (Boy brains are made of snails and snails can't read.  It's science.) 

So, okay, I get that if your boy child is feeling the need to be all macho, and you want to appeal to his interests, he's going to gravitate towards stereotypically masculine topics.  (Like whiskey.  Or the first world war.)  But why phrase it as "not girly" topics? (That's a quote, by the way.)  Why not phrase it as "topics in which your kid is interested, whatever that happens to be?" 

(For example: your kid is interested in pie, even though all baked goods are inherently girly.  But wait.  Are they?  I'm confusing myself.  On the one hand, I assume all pie is baked by 1950s housewives with aprons and lipstick and heels, which would make pie a feminine thing.  But then, that's insane because, like I said, everyone likes pie.  Placing food on a gender scale is stupid.  So is labeling things like sports or space travel or pants.)

By this logic, would Harry Potter or the Chronicles of Narnia or A Series of Unfortunate Events be masculine enough to get recommended to an apathetic middle grade reader?  (Is Jesus more or less masculine than pants?) This is baffling to me.

One article suggested getting your son a mainly space in which to read, like a tree house (or a leather arm chair).  This is so the boy child's masculinity remains firmly intact even as they do the less-than-manly activity of reading. 

So this advice is basically saying, if your boy child is suffering from the fallout of gender stereotypes, you should help them by pushing them even further into those gender norms!

Books and Moving

These are the books I packed and moved on this last round of uprooting my entire life and moving it down the street and around the corner.

I have a lot of friends who talk about how they go into bookstores and buy everything.  How do they manage?  I haven't bought a hard copy of a book in a year and a half because it's so much easier to hide what I'm reading when it's on a kindle, and I have the vague image in my head of the last time I had to pack up my books.

Funny thing is that the harrowing tower of books in my memories is still not this big. 

Books are flipin' heavy.  This isn't that much of a problem, except for the fact that they also fit really well in boxes.  With a little bit of of spatial reasoning, you can really pack them in there.  But then once you fill a box, you go to lift it, only to find that you basically just filled a box with bricks.

So you have to sacrifice efficient packing for not pulling all the muscles in your back.  For some reason, this irritates me, because efficient packing is a beautiful thing.  But that means that the saving grace here is that these boxes are actually only half full of books and half full of outerwear and towels.  This also irks me, because think of how awesome it would be in the packing process to get to move a super light box full of linens.  Especially after you've moved a super heavy box of books.

Maybe Senpai Will Notice You This Year

(Written instead of "Helping Your Child Cope with Back-to-School Anxiety")

School is starting again! Do you have your cute outfit and hair accessories picked out? Have you called your friends to find out if you have the same lunch? Do you have 8 sharpened #2 pencils and the requisite number of binders? Good job! That's 10% of the battle, and 10% of all your anxieties set to rest.

But what if senpai doesn't notice you this year?!

He's so dreamy. With his hair and his eyes. You really want to touch his hair. I bet it's softer than it looks. And you could get lost in his eyes. There are untold depths there of all the things you don't know about him. And his smile—that secret one, just for you, that he gave you in the hallway that one time. He's so nice and smart and funny. I bet he'd be even more nice and smart and funny once you get around to having a conversation with him about his favorite bands and snack food and tragic back story. It's a very tragic back story. You can soothe his pain with your love. And then get married.

If only he would notice you. But alas. He probably doesn't know your name. Or that you're meant to be together.

It's tragic and stressful suffering through your unrequited love. But good news! Here are some tips for winning him over.

1. Make sure your outfit is super cute. Cute first-day-of-school outfits have a direct correlation with popularity.
2. Trip and fall on him. Surefire way to get his attention. Maybe he'll help you pick up your scattered books. Maybe he'll tell you that your skinned knee looks painful and his eyebrows will furrow with concern. Your heart might explode. Bring a paper bag to breathe into as soon as he picks you up off the floor and leaves with his friends.
3. Talk to him. Haha. No. Just kidding.
4. Check out his friend. He's such a jerk. So rude. You can't stand him and yet you know all about him and you can bicker with him for hours. Spoiler for next spring: he's the love of your life. Move on sooner rather than later.

Columbus Discovers Virginia

The single biggest thing that irritates me while reading is when I can't tell if the author is ignorant or if the character is ignorant.

For example, I once read a story with beautiful descriptions of this old, decrepit mansion named after the mansion in Citizen Kane.  Awesome.  Awesome until they named the mansion "The Citizen."  And I blew a gasket.  Now, do none of the characters in this book realize that the mansion in Citizen Kane is called Xanadu, thus showing their ignorance as they try to look more cultured than they are?  Or has the author never actually seen this movie?  I feel like the former is more interesting and telling of the characters, but I also feel like there would be further evidence of this in the story.  Like an informed character would call them on it.

This also happens a lot in young adult post-apocalyptic fiction.  Accurate history has been lost, so the characters state facts that are just not true.  I can understand how this would be a difficult line to walk.  If none of the characters in the universe the author has created knows the truth, then mentioning that this isn't how it happened could break several point of view rules.  But on the other hand, I side eye sections where the facts they're repeating already exist in the realm of "common misconceptions of today."  Then I have to wonder if I'm reading too much into it to assume that the characters are just misinformed, when it's just that the author didn't listen in high school history.

I think this partially comes from the modernist lens through which I see the world.  My first question when I get stumped with something is to ask "what did the author mean with this?"  Then if I can't guess, I get frustrated.

As a corollary to this, if I'm stopping to ask myself this, it means I've been thrown out of the story, and I don't like that.

I think it also comes from the long period of time I spent editing the speculative fiction of a group of teen girls.  This creeping horror builds in my chest and climbs up my throat every time I have to write the question, "Do you realize that what you just wrote is sexual assault?"  While in my head I'm screaming, DO YOU KNOW THAT THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE?!  THERE IS NO EVIDENCE HERE THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS NOT OKAY.  Okay, so your characters don't get this, but PLEASE TELL ME YOU ARE NOT BUYING THAT THIS IS ROMANTIC.

And then this leads into the tangled mess of whether or not I think the author has the moral obligation to present a message I agree with.  And the short answer is "sorta."  Romanticizing terrible things makes me queasy, but then I understand that what I think is terrible is completely different from what other people think is terrible.  For instance, I don't care about swearing and don't care if the author glamorizes their profane characters.  But missing an opportunity to use the word Xanadu?  That's unacceptable. 

Fourier Series in Everyday Life.

I'm going to talk about math, and then I'm going to get philosophical, so stick with me.

There is this thing called a Fourier Series.  The Fourier Series is the subject of my favorite joke of all time, and no one ever gets it and that is one of life's cruelties. 

Basically, let's say you have a weird function and you want to find the equation for it. 

Like this step function I made in MS Paint.

Sometimes, it's just too hard to get the exact equation because the function you want was drawn in a default image editor, so you decide to get as close as you can and just use that. 

Oh yeah!  Looking good!

So I draw a sine wave (the blue line), which gets the up and down part but leaves something to be desired.  This first guess is called the first order term, or the first thing you do.  But we can do more.  We can take another sine wave, add it to this one, and together they add and subtract from each other to bring us closer to what we want.

A graph I didn't draw in MS Paint

So here, the black shows the first order term.  The blue shows the first order term added to another sine wave, and the red shows an even higher order term to get pretty close to that blocky function we wanted.  Ta dah!  Close enough!

Yesterday, I realized that I approach projects as if they were Fourier Series.  The first draft or the first try is like the first order term.  It's general and not even really close to what you want, but it's a start.  Then you go over it and make it a touch better, then a touch better than that.  The corners of your blocky function stat to come in.  You iron out individual pieces.  Only later can you start working out details until you get close enough to what you want.

Word Choice to Reflect Character Mood

In the story on which I'm currently working, the main character can possess inanimate objects and make them move around.  He takes it as a point of professional pride that these movements are as lifelike as possible.  His favorite is a paper-craft dog that runs around and acts like a real dog.  The point is that he devotes a large amount of time and effort to making sure people don't know that he's the one moving the dog around, to making it look like he's not a puppeteer, but rather making people believe that the dog is alive and acting of its own volition.

This presents an interesting writing decision.

The emphasis could be on the dog's actions, presented as if it is its own character as most people would see the dog.  "She wagged her tail, the whole back half of her body swinging with her enthusiasm."

Or the emphasis could be on how he is controlling the dog, which makes sense since the story is from his perspective.  "He caused her tail to wag enthusiastically, swinging the whole back half of her body."

So which way to go?  I think it really depends on the situation, and is a line by line decision rather than an umbrella decision that affects each and every instance.

• How much is the main character thinking about his actions?  Is he trying something difficult where he really has to focus on his actions?
• How much has he deluded himself that the dog is a separate entity?
• Is there some fatigue in the paragraph from being specific about that he's controlling the dog.  "Yeah, yeah.  We get it.  He's controlling the dog."  Because it (or at least the example I just used) strikes me as clunky writing and a whole passage written like that is going to slow the story down, but that might be a good device at certain points.  
• How much is he working on deluding others?  Or how plot essential is it at the moment that he's pretending that the dog's a dog?  Reminding the reader that he's controlling the dog would break the illusion.

So basically, it's going to be a continuum, and the choice will reflect the main character's state of mind in the moment.

This is kind of like some previous things I've written where characters use an alias.  Which name I call them depends on who they're with, how they're acting, and if they're identifying more with one personality or another.

I'm sure there are other examples of this.  Any suggestions?

BYOT XIII

(Edit 9/1/14: the video is up!  Watch it!)

Despite my fears and awkward posts about how I didn't know what I was doing, my script at Bring Your Own Theater turned out well.  The actors liked the characters, and the director said I made it the easiest day of his life and then drunkenly kissed everyone.  I've heard it said that the best compliment you can give an artist is not to tell them that you love their work, but to tell someone else that you love their work.  At BYOT, someone came up to me and said, "I heard your script is great," meaning that someone who had read it had told them this.  That's all kinds of awesome, even if people were being especially nice to me after I acted so concerned and new.

But more importantly than my script getting good reception, the play was amazing.  The actors (who were all unbelievable) completely owned it.  As my director told them later in a fit of excited passion, "You were the only three people in that room."  They changed some lines by adding swear words which made it feel more natural and emotional, and they added a few jokes, all of which I approve of 100%.  It was a collaborative effort--one that I'm honored I was a part of and was not at all something worth worrying about.  I gave them a plot and characters and a spirit, and then ran with it, expanded upon it, made it breathe.

So it was awesome and I liked it, and I'm sharing the video of the performance and my script below the cut.  Enjoy!

Script Writting Research

Tonight I am participating in Bring Your Own Theater.  Writers show up at 8PM, then have 12 hours to write a play.  At 8AM, they hand over their script to a team of directors and actors, who then rehearse for 12 hours.  At 8PM, the show goes on and the plays are preformed.  I am excited, even if my weekend is chaos and this means I won't sleep for 36 hours.

Now, as you may recall, I don't know much about writing scripts.  Can you hear my awkward, embarrassed laugh/rubbing the back of my neck combo?  This does not worry me, because the stakes are pretty low here.  How badly can I fail?  Quality is retaliative when you consider that everything was written in twelve hours, and "The Worst Play in BYOT History" might actually be a badge of honor.

But in order to take this experience seriously, get the most out of it that I can, and show respect to my actors and directors, I should look into this ahead of time.  My original idea was to spend this week doing this and reading examples, but, welp, time makes fools of us all!  In this crunch time, here is what I have learned.

Formatting: 

As it states on this page, "How good could the play be if the playwright doesn’t even know the basics of formatting?"  Also, I've heard that you can time it so that each page of dialogue is one minute of stage time.  This boggles me in the same way that "One page is 250 words" boggles me.  If you just change the margins, spacing, or font, that immediately makes no sense.  So there has to be some standardization here.  Which (just like novel formatting) is fairly easy to look up.

• Courier 12 pt.  ...Okay then.
• Then there's a title page and a "dramatis personae" page, each of which has their own formatting, that I can easily arrange later.  I always considered the dramatis personae to be spoiler-tastic and skip when I'm reading. "Daniel: A figment of Steve's imagination."  Or maybe I'm making that up and it's not supposed to give away that much information. And I guess it's not really there for me to read anyway.  Do you need this if there are only 2 characters?
• Here, we go.  All margins but the left is 1 inch.  Left is 1.5 inches.  
• Character names are in caps and indented 4 inches from the left (rather than centered, as I assumed).  Stage direction is in parentheses and indented 2.75 inches from the left.

So maybe format when I'm done, because that looks like a hastle to reset the indentations all the time.


How Much Stage Direction:

• Stage directions are directions.  Anything the actor can't control should not be there, and actions should be assigned to an actor.
• Vital sets and props should be introduced in scene setting and entrance directions, instead of appearing suddenly.
• "Don't give too much, but don't give too little."  Gee, thanks!  So I guess this is a balance you have to hit with practice?  And it looks like tonight is when I practice!

These were my questions going in.  Seems one was super easy to answer and the other is a kind of non-answer.  I imagine I'll have more questions when I get started and start working with more experienced people.  I will keep you updated.

Secret Plans for a Secret Society

Ink & Blood has ongoing story lines for the characters we've created. And by “characters we've created” I mean “actual people who are completely real and none of them are me in a mask.”

Last month, one of our members died. Three different people claimed to have killed him. There was a funeral, which featured jugglers and a hefty, bungling investigation by the local authorities.

The problem is we only mentioned this briefly, and so very few people know about it all.

So does this make it an even more secret society since we hint at history every so often, yet it's never completely explained?

Or do we need to have a more efficient method of conveying these stories? Right now we're mostly talking about them amongst ourselves every now and then, and posting ten minute word duels about them on the website. But surely if I spent more than ten minutes on them they could be complete stories that are actually informative.

Perhaps this is a project for next week: ten minutes every morning to make one story that works for the website.

Back in the Saddle

I had a crazy week last week and fell off the regular blog post wagon.  And a couple other wagons too.  Think of it like the wagons were in a pile and I was on top, but then I rolled down, bouncing from wagon to wagon until I landed in the gravel in a pile yesterday afternoon and decided to watch TV and eat fro yo. 

When I was a senior in high school, I was diagnosed with leukemia.  (Turns out, when I got a second opinion, that this was bogus, but for a while there I was a mess and I was still pretty sick regardless of the diagnosis.)  So I turned in a bunch of things late, including the only English paper I was ever proud of.  I handed it in and said to Ms. MacDonald, "I feel like I owe you an excuse."  At this point someone behind me shouted, "Boo!  She doesn't want your excuses!"  And I figured that was fair, took my A minus, and went about my business.

So again, Boo!  No one wants my excuses!  Bad things happened, I dealt with them at the expense of other things.  Now they're over and it's time to move on.

Today is about getting back in the saddle.  Today is about letting go.

Point of View and Greater Things that Don't Matter

I made my husband watch The Fall with me last night.  In it, Roy (Lee Pace) and a little girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) are patients in a hospital, where they strike up a friendship as he tells her visually striking stories.  Horror ensues.

One of my favorite things about it is how it's clearly from Alexandria's point of view.  Most of the plot around how Roy was injured and what he's up to are told in the background, overheard in another room while the camera focuses on Alexandria making shadow puppets.  She doesn't understand and doesn't really care.  She cares about hearing more of the story, entertaining herself, and making the people she loves happy, and that is the focus of the movie.  The rest happens around her and the viewer is able to piece it all together without being spoon fed.   

This device is also one of the reasons I love my favorite book, Howl's Moving Castle.  Which is a fantasy story about Sophie, a girl under a curse that makes her old.  She ends up working as the cleaning lady for the Wizard Howl in his castle, which (you guessed it) moves around.

This story is presented from Sophie's point of view.  Even as important things are happening around her, just in her periphery, her main concerns are issues that directly affect her: her sisters' welfare, Howl's antics, the state of the bathroom,  etc.

From the first chapter, "The most interesting thing was the talk from the customers.  Nobody can buy a hat without gossiping.  Sophie sat in her alcove and stitched and heard that the Mayor never would eat green vegitables, and that Wizard Howl's castle had moved round to the cliffs again, really that man, whisper whisper, whisper...The voices always dropped low when they talked of Wizard Howl, but Sophie gathered that he had caught a girl down in the valley last month.  "Bluebeard!" said the whispers, and then became voices again to say the Jane Farrier was a perfect disgrace the way she did her hair.  That was one who would never attract even the Wizard Howl, let alone a respectable man.  Then there would be a fleeting, fearful whisper about the Witch of the Waste.  Sophie began to feel that Wizard Howl and the Witch of the Waste should get together."

I like this because it feels true to life.  If someone were to write a story about me, even though great and terrible things are happening around the world, they only have a tangential effect on my life, on my story.  They would be background.  Even though I care about politics, I care about other things more.

I also feel like this is a difficult narrative trick to pull off, and I appreciate how well it's done in both these instances.  For it to work, a writer has to give enough information to allow the reader to piece it all together, but to do it in such a way that it's not like zooming the camera in on it, lingering, and shouting, "Checkhov's gun!  Checkhov's gun!"  They have to do it in a way that feels true to the character, and in doing so, it'll set up a feedback loop, making the characterization better.  "This character does not care about these things, and now you know more about them!"

And then they all died. Again.

I've been watching Supernatural lately.  Since I've been watching it in full binge mode because it's on Netflix instant watch (or at least today it is,) I've noticed a theme I want to talk about today.

The two main characters die constantly.

One of them dies and the other brings him back, then the other dies and the first one brings him back, or one of them dies and it was just a dream or a time loop or what have you.  They just die all the time.  And although there are some really interesting issues that crop up with their various methods of dying and being brought back, I've become acclimated to it.  The last time it happened my response wasn't anything visceral, but rather "Huh.  Wonder how long he'll stay dead."

I care about the characters, but death is no longer a stake that I can take seriously.  I'm more worried that one of them will be sad (even though that happens all the time too.)

Part of this is just the nature of serialized television.  Of course they aren't going to kill off a main character.  I doubt the show would work with only one of them running around.  I doubt the fan-base would stand for one of the guys leaving the show.  The other part is that I'm about 5 seasons behind and I know that they're both still on the show.  I'm well aware they're both walking around, but I guess one or the other or both of them might be a friendly ghost or sharp-witted zombie or something.  If that's the case, it doesn't look like too much has changed.  Maybe the deaths would have been more dramatic if I was watching it as it aired.

So somehow, killing them repeatedly has actually lowered the stakes.

Thinking about this reminds me of another show I watched--an anime called Attack on Titan.  Everybody dies.  Everybody.  No one is safe.  In watching this, I got to the point where I purposefully stopped remembering the characters' names, because as soon as I learned their names they would die in the next episode.  I started doing this thing where, when I realized I was starting to emotionally invest in a character, I would pull back and say to myself, "No.  He's going to die soon.  It's not worth it."

So in Attack on Titan, the stakes stayed high, but they were raised at the cost of me caring about any of the characters.

I can't decide if these two situations are the opposites of one another or if they're basically the same: so much character death has made me less invested in some aspect of the show.  Maybe they're so far in opposite directions that they end up in the same place.

Be not afraid of growing slowly

About a month ago, I started going to yoga. 

I think yoga gets a bad rap from people who don't know that much about it.  Bendy girls in sports bras talking about breathing deeply while they contort themselves in silly ways.  Well, yeah, technically that happens.  But that misses the heart of it.  Yoga is about accepting what you can and can't do, it's about pushing yourself, and then letting go of your failures.  If you can't do one of the poses, that's fine.  It's not about being perfect or comparing yourself to others.  It's about doing what you can and building on that.  There are easier versions of every pose that you can start in and work your way forward, or you can use them if you're just having an off day.  It's a practice, which means you have to put energy into it.  It means that you're not going to get everything right immediately.

The theme of Tuesday's class was "Be not afraid of growing slowly.  Be only afraid of standing still."  Our teacher recited this three times during class, each time while we were folded in child's pose, our eyes closed, refocusing our practice at points when our intentions might wander.  It spoke to me on a deep, personal level, and can be applied to just about everything in my life right now.

Like juggling.

Like querying.

Like writing.

I'm always hearing this slowly-but-surely method encouraged in writing...Write a little every day...Never give up...Winners don't quit...Write and write and write and write and then throw it all away...I reblog something about it almost every day on Go Write Right Now in hopes that they will motivate someone, or speak to someone the way a few have spoken to me. 

I wonder if they work.  I'll probably never know.

So, okay.  I'm not where I want to be on my word count.  But you know what?  That's okay.  At least I'm moving forward.  It will get done eventually.  These things just take time.  (LOADS of time.)  The only time I'm letting myself feel guilty about how little I did are the few days when I end up writing nothing.  That's standing still.  Boo!

Draw a Scientist

Education, science, and methodology day!

There's this activity that's pretty common, which made me really happy when I first saw it.  It's called the Draw-a-Scientist Test.  Basically, a class of kids is asked to describe a scientist and draw a picture.  They all draw white guys with wild white hair, wearing a lab coat, holding some kind of bubbling chemical in a beaker.  The class then goes on a field trip to Fermilab, and when they come back, they adjust their description and picture.  All of a sudden, scientists are normal people in jeans, in front of computers.  There are women and people of color thrown into the mix.  Check these out.


So neat!  Warms my little science heart!

But wait.

A group of researchers looked as these results and probably noticed that eighth graders drew the same picture of a scientist in a lab coat when asked to draw a scientist, even if they took the field trip to Fermilab as seventh graders and supposedly learned that scientists are just like you and me.  That, or they noticed that the pictures of scientists drawn after the field trip basically reiterate the theme of the trip, which was repeated over and over: scientists are normal people!

So they asked the kids instead to "Do a drawing which tells what you know about scientists and their work."  All of a sudden, the drawings looked a whole lot like the drawings that were produced after the field trip.  Turns out that when kids hear "Draw a scientist" they assume you're asking "Draw the most stereotypical scientist you can.  The one your teacher is looking for you to draw right now."

So this speaks to the fact that kids (and people in general) will often assume there is a correct answer and are good at judging the answer you want them to give.  You want them to draw an antisocial chemist with questionable hygiene?  Here you go!  You want them to draw the guy they met on the field trip with a speech bubble stating the point of the trip?  You got it!

If you make a face at a fairy, it probably makes one back

There are a few tropes out there that give me pause for no rational reason.  By this I mean that when they crop up I roll my eyes, go "not this again," and then keep reading with this look on my face.

One of them: Fairies.

This came up today, and when I started talking about it, the general consensus of the group was that there is something wrong with me.

I should point out that this is not a deal breaker, I won't throw the book, and I'm not going to badmouth anyone's work where they do crop up.  It's just that they give me pause and it is entirely my own issue.  If there are other things going on, if the plot is interesting, or the writing's nice, I can even enjoy it. (Plug for The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff, which is about a changeling boy.)

But here's why I get annoyed.

Growing up, the only exposure I had to fairies was the Mary Martin version of Peter Pan and the Legend of Zelda games.  Fairies were scatterbrained and excitable and indignant and rude, but ultimately, they were cute and funny and great characters.  And what were they going to do?  Make farting noises at you?  Hurt your feelings?  Pull your hair?  They were awesome.  Navi was the best.  Tinkerbell was amazing.  When I write fairies (which I've definitely done) they're like this.

So I think this love for ball-of-light fairies is where my dislike for hard-core- hierarchical -steal-your-baby-too-beautiful-for-words fairies comes from.  They're not what I picture when I think of fairies.  I get excited to see Tatl and then get disappointed when it's an elf who's cold and alien.

The phrase "Seelie Court" pops up and I make the face.

A lot of the stories that use fairies tap into a literary tradition that I am completely unfamiliar with, and then present it like I should be familiar with it.  I'm supposed to know the difference between the different courts and the different kinds of fairies, but I'm still stuck on "Wait, they're not a flashlight?"  

You're not supposed to thank them?  Was I supposed to know that?  Was this character supposed to know that?  Man, I'm out of the loop. I get more and more anxious and embarrassed as I read, and I keep wondering if I need to go read some epic poems before continuing, and then I just get frustrated and give up.

The versions I like have the mythology encapsulated within the story I'm reading.  In Peter Pan, when the first baby laughed for the first time, that laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.  There.  No need for me to go read an epic poem.  We're all on the same page.

I worry that because I love this simpler version, I must be doing it wrong.  I'm ofending this rich lore by clinging to a bastardized version.  How could I?!  I'm awful!  Just writing this blog post is going to make people hate me for being an ignorant, uncultured waste of space, who spits on the traditions of a whole continent!

Boo hoo!

The Birth of Athena

There's a story that the goddess Athena burst fully formed from Zues' head.

I like to tell this story when I'm teaching kids to factor.  Sometimes, you can just look at a problem and know the answer.  It bursts out of your mind, onto the page, and you're done.  This doesn't happen very often because these kiddos are not Zeus.  Generally, they have to put in the work and think it through and go through the steps.  But, on the rare occasions that it does happen, it's something amazing that we should tell stories about for thousands of years.

There's also something to be said for this story in the context of writing.  No story will burst fully formed from your head, pealing to the broad sky its clarion cry of war.  No.  They need to come out kind of lumpy and screamy.  they need to be molded with hard work.  They need to mature over time. They need to grow into their awkward ears.

And while stories that are born without editing have a magic to them, that's what they are: magic and myth.

In which I am ignorant about scripts

I've been thinking a lot about script writing lately and how much I don't know about it.

One of the ways this has come up recently is that I have fallen in love with the show Bob's Burgers, which is the animated story of a family that owns and operates a burger place.  It was created by Loren Bouchard, who also brought yuo Home Movies and Dr. Katz.

One of the things I love most about the show is how natural and effortless the dialogue is.  It sounds like a real, believable conversation.  The characters talk over each other, laugh at each others jokes, and interrupt themselves to switch to a different topic. What brings it to another level, is that you can tell through these conversations how the characters relate to each other.  If Bob is upset with his kids, he'll still take a moment in his rant to ask about something they said, he'll laugh at something they said or show some concern for their interests even as he's mad at them. 

So I started to wonder what I could learn from this.

And then it got complicated.

You see, large portions of the dialogue are ad-libbed and it's hard when looking at the final product to tell what was in the script and what wasn't.  Did the writers write false starts to sentences or was that the voice actor?  Would I, as a novelist, be able to find this quality I'm looking for by studying scripts? 

No, probably not.

Then I start asking: should I be looking at what just the writers have done?  No!  I should take the final product and learn from that.  I should learn from what the writers and the voice actors have created together and what parts speak to me and how I interpret it, rather than looking at what the writer created alone as just a part of the finished product.

Now, this is probably pretty obvious to everyone.  It's the combined forces of script writer, actors, and directors that create a story for TV or the stage.  It's obvious to me too, but community story telling is one of those things that's, to me, both fascinating and terrifying.

Set A Summer Study Plan for your Cat

Summer is a great time for your cat to study for the ACT/SATs.  They now have a great deal of time on their hands that they would spend lazing in a sun beam, letting all the study skills and math concepts they may have learned during the school year atrophy.  Keep your cat's mind sharp and help them prepare for this important test by encouraging them to make a study schedule.

Here's some tips!

1. Have your cat take a practice test.  Take a photo of them sleeping on the practice test.  Post it to Instagram. 

2. Be sure to work on timing.  Does your cat stare at one problem for hours without marking an answer?  Have them practice skipping problems that are difficult so they can come back to them later if they have time.

3. Your cat may be apathetic to studying.  Remind them that this is important and talk about you mutual goals.  You know best how firm to be while convincing your cat to study.

Best of luck!

First Draft Time

I started the first draft of my latest project on Monday. 

Right now it's kind of a mess because I had a false start (and actually, this makes false start #5 or so because this project is a rewrite of something I abandoned.)  The false start I wrote Monday is just chilling behind the one I thought up last night, waiting to make its way into the narrative eventually and looking all sloppy and misplaced.

It's like the ice scraper in the back seat of my car.  What's it doing there?  Nothing.  Taking up space.  When I give people rides, they have to nudge it to one side with their shoe.  I guess I could take in inside and store it in a closet until winter.  I guess I could throw it out and get a new one when I need it, because--let's face it--this guy's seen better days.  But then again, I could also leave it right where it is and have it ready when there's a freak snowfall next week.


The other thing that's disconcerting me is that I'm not moving as fast as I usually do.

I think there's two reasons for this.  First, I'm much busier this week than I have been when I've written first drafts in the past.  I have an article due Friday, my students are getting ready for finals and I'm meeting multiple times a week with some of them, and then a bunch of people told me that I need to watch Supernatural.  Next week, things should open up and I can sit in this coffee shop until they kick me out. 

The other part of it is that I've been in edit mode for so long, that it's taking me longer than I expected to get back into gear for filling a blank page.

So!  This week, I'm setting myself the assignment of 500 words a day.  Next week, I will go up to 1,000 words a day.  Then the week after, I'm kicking it up to NaNo levels of 1,666 words a day.  And, hey!  What a coincidence!  Camp NaNo starts next week. You can follow me/be friends with me here.

Edit: I was wrong, Camp NaNo starts in July.  Oh well.

Backstory is like an onion: you can peel it one layer at a time

I'm currently reading The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin.  It's the second book in a wonderful fantasy trilogy, and there are many great things to say about it, but I'll focus on one.

It has a remarkable narrative structure, where it's as though the main character is telling me a story, and through this, she's able to give seamless flashbacks and exposition.  She can go on tangents to explain back story, to explain why this event is culturally significant, to explain why it's personally important to the main character.  I have no problem with flashbacks, but having the subheading of <ten years earlier> always strikes me as less than ideal.  Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do for expediency's sake or because you're investing your efforts elsewhere, but the way she's worked around it here is impressive and worth a look.

The thing that's really neat about it is that she manages to do this while still maintaining suspense.  Things are kept from the reader.  The narrator touches on issues, then turns away from them.  Now, this usually irritates me to no end.  If I don't know something only because the book refuses to tell me, that's irritating.  But here, I'm never irritated, which is impressive given that at one point in the first book of the series, the narrator started half a sentence of a flashback, then changed her mind.  "My mother - No. Not yet."

And I was completely okay with it.

How?   What does Jemisin do to make this work so well?  I have theories.

• Flashbacks and explanations are kept short.  They're reminiscent of fleeting memories.  They are always related to the moment, rather than for something that will turn up at a later time (or not solely for that), so it feels natural for them to be discussed.
• Similar to this, flashbacks and legends are used regularly throughout the book, so this is a device we grow accustomed to.
• It's written in the first person, so we get to know the narrator, not necessarily to trust them, but to trust their story telling.  Part of this is that the narrator is a full, flushed out character.  She has flaws and strength and moods and reasonable reactions.  There's a sense of authenticity to her.  I trust that she's not actively keeping things from me out of spite or just to be obtuse, because I know the character wouldn't do that to me.  So this narrative device is completely bound up in characterization, the very foundation of the book.
• Closely related to that, the reader gets to know the character the way they get to know a person in real life: slowly, pieces at a time.  The main character opens up little by little, revealing more and more.  So, just as a person you just met wouldn't tell you the graphic details of their father's death, the narrator doesn't mention it in the first pages of the book.  Through this, the reader grows more and more invested in the character.
• Closely related to that, in a way, the reader doesn't want to push at issues that are too personal.  When information is withheld from me, I can detect that it's painful for the narrator to talk about it.  This is because her reactions, the way she talks about (or talks around) painful things is the way I or people I know talk about painful things.  When she glosses over things or changes the subject, I respect that.