I have an entry created for Blizzard’s writing contest, and while I think it’s okay, I want to be doubly sure it’s highly polished and as Blizzardy as possible. But it’s not about what I think, is it? It’s going to be read by other people.
So I need other people willing to read it. Specifically, I’m looking for at least two.
I need someone familiar with StarCraft. The game has some particulars in terms of lore, background, themes and mood. I want to make sure I’m hitting all of the major touchpoints and haven’t completely botched my timelines.
I also need someone familiar with writing. The words I’ve chosen are in a particular order, but I don’t know if they’re in the best order. I’ve gotten great feedback on Citizen in the Wilds thanks to people looking at the order of my words, and I’d love this little short work to get the same treatment.
Leave me a comment if you’re interested. I can send you an invite to the Google document via the email address you’ll input to post the comment. Once I’m a bit more confident in this, I’ll send it off to Blizzard and start making burnt offerings to any deity within celestial earshot.
It’s amazing how moving something small can make a huge difference.
We’ve been in the process of rearranging our apartment. The latest change saw a large stack of things by the lower corner of the bed, meaning I’d have to crawl out of it in a somewhat awkward manner. Over the weekend (Sunday night in fact) we moved things again, and I took it upon myself to shift that stack a bit, resulting in a much easier way for me to get up and about first thing in the morning.
I woke this morning with more energy and determination. All because I moved a couple boxes.
It’s hard to say how things will turn out when you start rearranging things, cleaning them up, putting them in a different order. The same thing could be said about writing, especially the revision process. Move a couple of words, put sentences in a different order, and hey presto, something that was just a brain-dump of information becomes taut and dramatic. Clean up a few things, and a mess becomes a masterpiece. It can even cure that thing we used to call ‘writer’s block’ before some sagely men in manly beards told us writer’s block is a crock.
Has this happened to you before? What are some good examples? Do you have particular days when you clean things up, be it around the house or in your writing?
Today’s guest post comes to us courtesy of Monica Flink. She’s a long-standing and very dear friend who is also struggling to get away from the day job environment through the power of the written word. She’s been published on AOL.com, Lifescript.com and eHow. She has guest lectured at colleges and is a regular contributor to Squashblossom Literary Magazine. Her blog is Poached Prose.
So of course he had a massive coronary shortly afterward.
Death by cake is not something that the world thinks of seriously. It is reserved for chintzy chain restaurants that want to advertise a dessert that tastes decent but is pulled out of the freezer and reheated when you order it as something worth the extra three dollars. But it puts the idea of death on the discussion table, and how it seems to be easier to accept in fiction, especially the more ludicrous it happens to be.
There are so many ways for people to die. Human beings, though the top of the food chain, are fragile creatures when you think about it. Hundreds of functions go on without our knowing it, and just one of them can go wrong and kill us. If a heart stops beating or a kidney fails to cycle out waste, our lives are snuffed out as easily as a candle under an industrial fan. Sometimes without us even realizing that there is something wrong. But natural causes aside, there are also so many ways to stop those functions with resources.
The oldest books in the world, whether you believe it is the markings of the Pyramids, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, have touched upon death and have done so with plausibility. Albeit with swords and bird things that come to collect us all to the Afterlife, but it worked for those time periods. And there you have the heart of the matter. Plausibility in death. Harrowing up the feelings of readers for the payoff you so desire by giving the protagonist, antagonist, or hapless bystander the right send off, so to speak.
Making the death of characters believable is difficult at best, and mostly because so few of us have trouble not only imagining such horrible things, but have been given such a skewed idea of it from the media. I need not name names, but let’s face it, those Hostel moves are shit on a stick, and younger generations of writers are going to see that garbage and assume people who are tormented like that will not just die of shock unless they are medically treated.
Luckily, fiction lends its self to this problem, because fiction is just that: fiction. It need not be as realistic as other visual media, but then again, it may make things more difficult. A writer might think it cool to have someone die while crushed by tap dancing giant iguanas wearing feather boas, but even if circumstances in a work of fiction lend themselves to that kind of end, it is still hard to write. Just as it is hard to imagine someone dying by having a piece of cake that no one should eat more than a single sliver of.
Proof that truth is stranger than fiction, even with death involved?
Perhaps. Yet, it reveals not only how difficult it is to make death in fiction plausible. It is easy for us to accept that a magical spell can rip the heart from a person’s rib cage, or light them in a pillar of unquenchable fire, but only if the story lends its self to such ends. If a piece of fiction has been all about guns and car chases for a hundred thousand words, to have it end with someone falling in a river and drowning, or perhaps just being strangled to death, is not only anticlimactic, but the exact opposite of what would probably satisfy the audience.
In the end, it comes down to how well the characters are written, and how well the story lends its self to death. Will it be more satisfying to have the main villain die when he goes careening off a comfortably placed cliff with a few sharp spikes at the bottom that just happen to be there, or have an aneurysm in his brain splatter across the gray matter when he samples a piece of cake that should have never been made in the first place?
Coming up with a quote about writing about death would have been an excellent way to end this. Instead, I leave you all with the idea that writing about death does not have to be horrible, difficult, or even creative. It just needs to be believable.
Every hero is a protagonist. But not every protagonist is a hero.
Some characters start out as heroes, while others are just the focal point of the story. Pure heroism is a rarity in our world, so when we see a Superman or a Captain America or an Obi-Wan Kenobi, we’re a bit in awe of the sight. It also makes us appreciate the likes of Batman, Iron Man and Luke Skywalker all the more, because they didn’t start as heroes, they had to discover their heroism.
Chuck mentioned John McClain which got me thinking on the subject. There’s nothing obviously heroic about John. He’s a hard-working, street-smart, somewhat abrasive but endearing kind of guy. Only when the building gets locked down and he goes into high gear to find out what’s happening as well as stay alive does he reveal the aspects of himself that make him a hero. He starts as a protagonist – likable but not all that remarkable. He becomes a hero – selfless, cunning, courageous and unwilling to give up or stop while there’s still villains to be fought.
What other examples can you think of, when it comes to a protagonist growing into the role of hero?
Yesterday I talked about the constraints of an established universe and what to do if you want to avoid raising the ire of the fan community. However, keep in mind that this is merely advice for most fan works. Sometimes you want to break the established constructs for one reason or another. That’s fine. Nothing new is created without something old being at least partially destroyed.
This is done a lot in fanfiction. A lot of Mary Sues are born out of a writer’s desire to break a character’s norms, have them develop in a different way. Most of the time, that ‘different way’ is falling in love with/universally praising/getting in a situation in which they can only be saved by the aforementioned Sue. On the one hand, this isn’t a bad way to acquaint oneself with writing within the constraints of a given established universe, or more than one if you’re doing a crossover. On the other, be prepared for even more flak than usual depending on which direction your Sue takes you.
I’m not saying all fan fiction has Sues or author insertion characters. The crossover epic Unity keeps the characters from both established universes pretty consistent while playing with reader expectations. If pressed to recommend some “good” fan fiction, that’d be it.
And then there are parodies.
A good example of using lore for the purpose of parody is a YouTube series called The GMod Idiot Box, created by some guy calling himself Das Bo Schitt. While there’s some pretty screwball comedy that goes on within the episodes, he actually goes to some length describing how his characters came to be. He couples familiar sights and sounds from popular Valve games with well-chosen music and some classic comedy gags. I can’t say everybody would enjoy the videos, as some of the comedy borders on the juvenile, but some of it does get me rolling on the floor laughing.
Which says a lot about me, I guess.
Anyway, those are a couple ways a writer or artist can use established lore without staying entirely constrained within its mores. What are some others?
