I'm excited to announce
the first season of
The Twenty Percent True Podcast
Modern Monsters
Coming this April.
Showing posts with label Modern Monsters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Modern Monsters. Show all posts
March 4, 2017
February 25, 2017
Those Emotions are Wrong
My biffle has been
reading through Modern Monsters, and I'm enough of an anxious busybody that I keep
checking in on the google document she's reading to read her
comments.
In one of the
stories, someone attacks the main character. It's supposed to be a shocking
moment of violence, but my biffle's response was along the lines of
“Yeah! Get her!”
I was horrified.
“If you want the main character to be
beaten, I've done something wrong. This is bad.”
“No,” she said,
“You elicited an emotional response. That's a good thing.”
“But it's not the
response I want, and it's going to make is so the ending doesn't
work.” And, indeed, the ending didn't work for her.
My initial gut
instinct was to reject everything she said because she was just
wrong, and then to rationalize that decision with the fact that the
two of us consistently treat violence in fiction differently. But
visceral rejections like this are the ones to which I really need to
pay attention, because they mean that deep down I knew something was
wrong. Also, it was completely unfair to my awesome biffle, who was
taking the time to read my draft and tell me what she thought. I
spent the day coming up with a frantic list of ways to make the
main character more sympathetic and to make what's happening more clear,
which I think are going to turn out to be really important edits that
give it some of the polish it was lacking.
But this got me
thinking about a lot of things.
1. Can I control my reader's emotions? On the one hand, of course not! How presumptive of me! There's always going to be someone who feels differently than I expect, and I see it all the time as a reader where I can tell the author wants me to feel one way and I burst out laughing instead. Was that a misfire on their part, or does that work on most people and I'm just the weird one out? Is it just a numbers game: most people will feel pathos for this lost puppy? On the other hand, there are definitely ways emotions can be manipulated. On the other side of the spectrum, there are the unearned tears I shed at the end of a movie when the music swells and there's one really good line, but the character didn't earn those tears. It's probably somewhere in the middle and going too far in either direction is a lazy way out.
2. My friend noted that the ending didn't work. For her, the middle wasn't a problem, but she noted what she was feeling. One thing I've learned from this short story exercise is that the problem isn't really the ending, and isn't even really the middle. The problem is the beginning, where that character is not set up correctly. That's were I need to do most of the work.
February 18, 2017
Not Yet
When I take my toddler to the doctor, I have to fill out pages of questionnaires about his development. Can he stack four blocks? Does he point at things? Can he walk backward? The cool thing about this is that I can say, "Heck yes! He walks backward like a champ!" But the other cool part is that the options for answers are "Yes," "Sometimes," and "Not yet."
"Not yet" is nice.
Is he using a spoon? Well, not exactly. We're working on it. He'll get it.
I got Modern Monsters edited last week to the point where I was ready to send it to readers. This was a big accomplishment for me, but rather than basking in my greatness, I sat down to send a few of them off to a critique group. So I went through them and thought, "Which are the five worst ones?" and then made a list of all the stories and all the things I didn't like about them so I could compare their problems and make a decision about which ones to send. I discovered that they were all terrible and I was a terrible writer and a terrible person.
This discovery rained on my celebratory parade.
I need to change the way I think about it--for my writing and for my life in general. It's not "Which are the worst?" but it's "Which ones need attention?" It's not "No" or "Bad" or "Oh God, everything's awful." It's "Not yet." It's "I'm working on it." It's "It'll get there." Not just the way I talk about it, but the way I think about it needs adjustment.
"Not yet" is nice.
Is he using a spoon? Well, not exactly. We're working on it. He'll get it.
I got Modern Monsters edited last week to the point where I was ready to send it to readers. This was a big accomplishment for me, but rather than basking in my greatness, I sat down to send a few of them off to a critique group. So I went through them and thought, "Which are the five worst ones?" and then made a list of all the stories and all the things I didn't like about them so I could compare their problems and make a decision about which ones to send. I discovered that they were all terrible and I was a terrible writer and a terrible person.
This discovery rained on my celebratory parade.
I need to change the way I think about it--for my writing and for my life in general. It's not "Which are the worst?" but it's "Which ones need attention?" It's not "No" or "Bad" or "Oh God, everything's awful." It's "Not yet." It's "I'm working on it." It's "It'll get there." Not just the way I talk about it, but the way I think about it needs adjustment.
December 10, 2016
Thinking About Short Stories
With my current project writing short stories, I'm piecing together ideas about plot and learning a fair bit about myself.
The first thing I learned is that my natural medium is definitely novels. I come up with back story and character quirks that would add dimension to the characters or enrich themes or affect the plot eventually, but in a short story there is no "eventually." There's only the now, and those quirks are just hanging there, extra and unneeded.
A friend of mine once told me that short stories are like a spiral. He didn't elaborate on this metaphor, and it didn't make any sense to me without an explanation. (A short story is also like a chicken. It's also like the color yellow. See, those mean nothing.) So this week I looked it up, hoping someone on the internet would have a better explanation--or any explanation.
So think of an atrium with a spiral staircase around it. The ancient, magical tree in the middle of the atrium is the point of your story. As you climb the stairs, you spiral around it, seeing the magical tree from different angles, but still focusing on the tree. So in a short story, everything you say, everything that happens, is an investigation of your theme, but from different angles. Therefore, all the details, the quirks and the back ground and the world building, have to relate to the point of your story.
Another friend of mine has a podcast, where in last week's episode he shared some advice and helpful questions that he'd heard. The advice was this: everything under the sun has already been written, so don't worry about making the plot too complicated. Stick with a simple plot and let the strength and originality of your characters carry the story and make it original.
I like that. I need a simple plot that I can tell in a sentence or two, and then the rest I can fill with characters and details and world building, as long as those details stay on target, focusing on my magical tree in the atrium and not wandering off the spiral staircase and down a hallway.
So I started thinking about simple plots, and the examples that help me are all pretty silly.
1. Picture books. I have a toddler, so we read a lot of picture books. We read a lot of the same picture books over and over and over, and my toddler is starting to get annoyed with me when in the fourth repeat of "Pierre" I start analyzing the plot instead of doing the funny Pierre voice. (the first two read throughs are for reading, the third is for "where's the dog? There's the dog!" and the fourth is apparently for me to talk to myself.)
2. Fables and fairy tales. I've been thinking about the structure and tone of fairy tales off and on for the past year, and thinking about how that structure and tone relates to the tall-tale oral tradition, so putting this into practice has been fun. I have a friend (the same friend with the podcast) that wrote a writing workbook for children using fables as a model. Bad friend admission: I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I think I'm going to bust it out this week.
3. Shaun the Sheep. This is a claymation TV show with seven minute long episodes that revolve around a herd of sheep, the dog that looks after them, and the farmer who has no idea the sheep have any adventures at all. Actually, "adventures" is kind of a strong word. In one episode the sheep refuse to take baths because there's no hot water, so they sneak into the farmhouse and siphon the hot water from the farmer's bath. That's the plot. The fun and the charm of the show is in the sheep's attempts to run and hide from the dog so they don't have to take a bath, and in their attempts (that both succeed and fail) to sneak into the farmhouse and distract the farmer, and in the way they have a pool party in their hot bath at the end.
I've been keeping these in mind this week as I've worked, and I've been keeping in mind that I'll need to go back during the editing process and either ax large portions of my stories or twist them until they can do more to help the story along, until they can be part of the spiral staircase looking at the atrium, and until they can pull their weight.
The first thing I learned is that my natural medium is definitely novels. I come up with back story and character quirks that would add dimension to the characters or enrich themes or affect the plot eventually, but in a short story there is no "eventually." There's only the now, and those quirks are just hanging there, extra and unneeded.
A friend of mine once told me that short stories are like a spiral. He didn't elaborate on this metaphor, and it didn't make any sense to me without an explanation. (A short story is also like a chicken. It's also like the color yellow. See, those mean nothing.) So this week I looked it up, hoping someone on the internet would have a better explanation--or any explanation.
So think of an atrium with a spiral staircase around it. The ancient, magical tree in the middle of the atrium is the point of your story. As you climb the stairs, you spiral around it, seeing the magical tree from different angles, but still focusing on the tree. So in a short story, everything you say, everything that happens, is an investigation of your theme, but from different angles. Therefore, all the details, the quirks and the back ground and the world building, have to relate to the point of your story.
Another friend of mine has a podcast, where in last week's episode he shared some advice and helpful questions that he'd heard. The advice was this: everything under the sun has already been written, so don't worry about making the plot too complicated. Stick with a simple plot and let the strength and originality of your characters carry the story and make it original.
I like that. I need a simple plot that I can tell in a sentence or two, and then the rest I can fill with characters and details and world building, as long as those details stay on target, focusing on my magical tree in the atrium and not wandering off the spiral staircase and down a hallway.
So I started thinking about simple plots, and the examples that help me are all pretty silly.
1. Picture books. I have a toddler, so we read a lot of picture books. We read a lot of the same picture books over and over and over, and my toddler is starting to get annoyed with me when in the fourth repeat of "Pierre" I start analyzing the plot instead of doing the funny Pierre voice. (the first two read throughs are for reading, the third is for "where's the dog? There's the dog!" and the fourth is apparently for me to talk to myself.)
2. Fables and fairy tales. I've been thinking about the structure and tone of fairy tales off and on for the past year, and thinking about how that structure and tone relates to the tall-tale oral tradition, so putting this into practice has been fun. I have a friend (the same friend with the podcast) that wrote a writing workbook for children using fables as a model. Bad friend admission: I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I think I'm going to bust it out this week.
3. Shaun the Sheep. This is a claymation TV show with seven minute long episodes that revolve around a herd of sheep, the dog that looks after them, and the farmer who has no idea the sheep have any adventures at all. Actually, "adventures" is kind of a strong word. In one episode the sheep refuse to take baths because there's no hot water, so they sneak into the farmhouse and siphon the hot water from the farmer's bath. That's the plot. The fun and the charm of the show is in the sheep's attempts to run and hide from the dog so they don't have to take a bath, and in their attempts (that both succeed and fail) to sneak into the farmhouse and distract the farmer, and in the way they have a pool party in their hot bath at the end.
I've been keeping these in mind this week as I've worked, and I've been keeping in mind that I'll need to go back during the editing process and either ax large portions of my stories or twist them until they can do more to help the story along, until they can be part of the spiral staircase looking at the atrium, and until they can pull their weight.
November 17, 2016
NaNo: week ???
It is a complete failure on my part that I've yet to tell you about my exciting National Novel Writing Month project.
There's a challenge out there called The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge. It's an art challenge with a list of thirty kinds of monsters, and the challenge is to draw a different monster girl every day for thirty days. I'm doing this challenge a bit differently, and I'm writing a short story about a different monster girl every day for thirty days. I did change the list a little bit because the last handful of days don't specify a particular monster, so I've replaced those with monsters from The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge 2. This also means that for the first time (excluding Camp NaNos) I'm going full rebel and not writing part of a first draft of a novel, but rather first drafts of short stories.
I have many reasons for this, and I hope to get a few things out of it:
However!
You may notice that I am amazingly far behind on this project. It's embarrassing. The reason is that the last month has hit me with blow after blow, and I've yet to be able to recover before it smacks me down again. I started off November in the hospital, where I stayed for a few days when I had big plans to get a tumblr up and running to do a daily blog of my progress and possibly post the stories as I went along. I also had plans to make myself (for lack of a better term) a NaNo advent calendar: a new, brief, funny thing about writing every day for motivation. Alas! There's always next year.
When I got out of the hospital, my family ganged up on me to make me nap instead of write. This is a real thing that happened. The month continued on, being rude to me, until finally (and I've had it, so it is finally, or so help me God) Lennard Cohen died, and as well as I'd been holding it together, that was the last straw and I turned into a blubbering ball of tears.
Come on, life. I'm already down. Stop kicking me.
In terms of NaNo, I'm likening it to a marathon. Let's say I trained for a marathon and I was in great shape, then suddenly broke my leg. The cast came off the day before the race and I was technically all healed up, but when I went to go run, I mostly hobbled along, winded and sweaty, chanting, "No, no, I got this. I got this. I got this."
I've also let the blog get away from me, if you hadn't noticed. I've eaten up all the book reviews that I'd written ahead of time and scheduled to go up. So I have a plan now to every day do some work on the blog and write 500 words of my NaNo project until I build up my endurance and get the blog under control and can write 1,000 words a day of my NaNo project. Then when December starts, I'm going to pretend it's my own personal NaNo (Solitary Novel Writing Month, or SoNo) and buckle down and fly.
It's a bummer missing out on all the community and enthusiasm of real NaNo, but on the scale of things that have been bummers this month, it's pretty low.
There's a challenge out there called The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge. It's an art challenge with a list of thirty kinds of monsters, and the challenge is to draw a different monster girl every day for thirty days. I'm doing this challenge a bit differently, and I'm writing a short story about a different monster girl every day for thirty days. I did change the list a little bit because the last handful of days don't specify a particular monster, so I've replaced those with monsters from The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge 2. This also means that for the first time (excluding Camp NaNos) I'm going full rebel and not writing part of a first draft of a novel, but rather first drafts of short stories.
I have many reasons for this, and I hope to get a few things out of it:
- Plotting. Although world building and characterization come easily to me, plotting is and always has been a weak point. I want to force myself to write stories with a beginning, middle, and end for practice and to make myself feel better about my abilities.
- Back to writing as opposed to editing. Sometimes I'm in the mood to edit. Right now is not that time. It's been so long since I just wrote something new and it's freeing.
- Back to short story beginnings. The Firebird story was an experiment for me. It's about six story ideas mushed together and it's not how I usually go about writing a novel. All but one of my novel length stories have started as short stories that I later expanded into a novel, either making the short story the first chapter or using the structure of the short story as an outline. I want to go back to this tried and true method in hopes that
- One of the stories will spark something in me and become my next novel length project.
- Back to writing as opposed to editing
However!
You may notice that I am amazingly far behind on this project. It's embarrassing. The reason is that the last month has hit me with blow after blow, and I've yet to be able to recover before it smacks me down again. I started off November in the hospital, where I stayed for a few days when I had big plans to get a tumblr up and running to do a daily blog of my progress and possibly post the stories as I went along. I also had plans to make myself (for lack of a better term) a NaNo advent calendar: a new, brief, funny thing about writing every day for motivation. Alas! There's always next year.
When I got out of the hospital, my family ganged up on me to make me nap instead of write. This is a real thing that happened. The month continued on, being rude to me, until finally (and I've had it, so it is finally, or so help me God) Lennard Cohen died, and as well as I'd been holding it together, that was the last straw and I turned into a blubbering ball of tears.
Come on, life. I'm already down. Stop kicking me.
In terms of NaNo, I'm likening it to a marathon. Let's say I trained for a marathon and I was in great shape, then suddenly broke my leg. The cast came off the day before the race and I was technically all healed up, but when I went to go run, I mostly hobbled along, winded and sweaty, chanting, "No, no, I got this. I got this. I got this."
I've also let the blog get away from me, if you hadn't noticed. I've eaten up all the book reviews that I'd written ahead of time and scheduled to go up. So I have a plan now to every day do some work on the blog and write 500 words of my NaNo project until I build up my endurance and get the blog under control and can write 1,000 words a day of my NaNo project. Then when December starts, I'm going to pretend it's my own personal NaNo (Solitary Novel Writing Month, or SoNo) and buckle down and fly.
It's a bummer missing out on all the community and enthusiasm of real NaNo, but on the scale of things that have been bummers this month, it's pretty low.
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