Tag: Writing (page 13 of 47)

Cultivating Characters

Courtesy New Line Cinema

This is related to a post I made a few months ago regarding expository writing but it’s on my mind since my wife and I just finished watching (or rather re-watching) the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’d borrowed the extended editions from my mother, as my copies are elsewhere.

Anyway, this if Faramir. In the books, he’s markedly different from his brother, Boromir, in that he does not fall into the sway of the One Ring. Throughout the narrative, he remains completely uncorrupted, unlike most other characters who encounter the ring. Even Galadriel, one of the oldest, fairest and most powerful elves in all of Middle-Earth, is tempted by this prize, but Faramir says he wouldn’t take it even if he found it on the side of the road.

In the films, Faramir is briefly tempted. He gets as far as Osgiliath with the hobbits, but Sam breaking the truth to the Gondorian about how his big brother died coupled with watching Frodo very nearly get scooped up by a Nazg&#0251l shakes him out of it and moves him closer to the original text. Not enough for some fans, mind you, but you can’t please everybody.

Similarly, Aragorn doesn’t jump at the chance to become king in the movie. Instead of carting around Narsil in his back pocket waiting for the time to be right to reforge that sucker, in the films he shrinks back from the prospect of being king. He knows his family has a history of corruption and failure, having declined ever since the heroic death of Elendil and the utter undoing of Isildur because of the Ring. It’s only after many trials, many adventures, brushes with death and nearly losing the love of his life that Aragorn steps up and takes the noble legacy that’s been waiting for him all along.

As much as I’m a fan of the books, I like these takes on these characters a lot more. It shows growth, the development of the characters from an origin point to a final destiny. Aragorn doesn’t kick around in the North as Strider just to hide from Sauron as he does in the books; he also does it to hide from his own destiny, and the corruption he feels has eaten away at his lineage. Faramir’s line of not using the Ring even if he alone could save Gondor carries far more weight after his experiences with the Hobbits. It might not have been exactly what Tolkien intended, but along with expository writing, the man seemed to like birthing characters fully-formed from his mind.

Tolkien

Let me reiterate that this man’s brilliant. He builds fantastic worlds with rich history and it’s something that gives his narrative weight. But there are two things in his works that bother me a bit as a writer. In addition to the aforementioned exposition, a few of his characters don’t develop a great deal. They’re not grown through their experiences as the story unfolds, they simply are whatever Tolkien needs them to be.

It’s not true for all of his characters, certainly. Both Bilbo and Frodo are very different Hobbits from when they start out in the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. Even moreso, Bilbo changes because of his experiences in The Hobbit and when we catch up with him on his 111th birthday, he’s no longer the respectable bachelor of Bag End, but seen as something of a recluse and troublemaker. Given, these are the main protagonists of two narratives we’re talking about, while Aragorn and Faramir are somewhat less prominent. They’re no less important, however, given the structure and flow of the story.

While not every character in a story necessarily has to become changed by the events that unfold, the characters that directly impact those events should be cultivated in such a way that they do change. Otherwise, they quickly become static, even boring. I’d like to think that, in the way that Aragorn and Faramir were cultivated in the films to show their nobility and generosity of spirit through action and circumstance rather than telling us how noble they are, Tolkien would have approved.

Welcome to Scrivener: Getting Results

Courtesy Literature & Latte

So how did NaNoWriMo go? If you participated, that is. It’s my hope that, if you did, you’re looking at a somewhat complete & coherent manuscript. Maybe you’re still working on writing yours – if so, don’t fret. Rome wasn’t built in a day, as they say.

On the other hand, if you did finish, here’s a reminder that you’re not done yet. And if you’re working in Scrivener, here’s some tips for what you should be doing now, and what comes next.

Editing

The great thing about editing in Scrivener is that your work is divided up into easy-to-manage bits. You can move sections around, take some out, add new ones. And within those sections, remember that Scrivener has all of the tools of a mass-market word processor. Highlight text you’re unsure of, make notes to yourself, do all the things you need to do to make the text work.

This not only eases the editing process but makes rewriting much less of a daunting task. You can go right into the bits that need work, or start a whole new section of text while keeping the old one intact. Being inclusive in your editing helps you see what works and what doesn’t. Like any good tool, Scrivener makes this process easier without getting in the way of the process.

Compiling

When you’ve finally gotten the text where you want it and are confident in its structure, flow and end result, it’s time to release it into the world. Scrivener puts your text together in a variety of formats and lets you compile the text for many purposes.

Scrivener’s built-in templates, from novel to screenplay, take care of the end-result formatting out of the box. The front page, word count and spacing are all defined for you. You can send the compiled draft directly to the printer, or save the file as a PDF or even an RTF file for portability and sending to test readers or other contacts across the Internet.

I know a new version of the beta is coming in the next few weeks and I’m interest to see what tweaks have been made to it. I’d like to see if I can take one of my early Scrivener experiments and import it into one of the aforementioned templates. I want to make sure my end result looks as good as possible before it starts crossing other peoples’ desks.

If you’ve been trying out the Scrivener beta for Windows or Linux, how’s it gone for you? Are you an old-school Mac user with advice? Got questions on the software? Lay it on me.

And if you participated in NaNoWriMo, I hope you keep up the good work even though November’s behind us.

The Free Fiction Section

Bard by BlueInkAlchemist, on Flickr

I think I’ve needed to do this for a while.

I fancy myself a writer of speculative fiction. Sure, I’ll write non-fiction articles, read & edit the work of others, even toil in fields completely unrelated to writing. But my first and foremost desire is to use my grasp of language and imagination to provide an escape for people looking for new worlds in the pages of a book. I’ve put some fiction up here before, but it can be hard to find them and they aren’t necessarily the best I have to offer.

Thus, the Free Fiction section.

Every couple of weeks, I’ll put a new story up there. Sometimes it will be exhumed from the early days of the blog, sometimes it’ll be completely new. But it will always be free.

This week, I’ve edited and am re-presenting The Jovian Flight. Enjoy.

Habits & Dreams

Courtesty despair.com

Some personal stuff related to writing and my life in general follows. Maybe this stuff will be useful to somebody else, and I apologize in advance if you choose to click the spoiler link and find the following text empty, useless or pointless.

Spoiler
There are some habits that are good to get rid of. Excessive drinking, smoking a pack of cigarettes that are more chemicals than tobacco a day, picking your nose or other body parts in public… You catch my drift.

There are other habits that one should hold on to. Keeping up on household chores, paying bills on time (if one’s economic situation allows), things of that nature. It can be a lot easier to fall out of these habits than it is to lose the habits that are bad for us, mostly because the more effort something requires, the less inclined we are to do them, especially if there’s a dayjob and other responsibilities involved. Firing up a game or watching a movie requires a lot less effort than washing the dishes or changing the car’s oil, after all.

But the more we put those things aside, the longer we stay out of the good habits, the worse things get. Detritus piles up, be it dirty silverware or engine deposits or recyclable waste. Then more effort than what should have been necessary is required to deal with that detritus, leaving us even more drained and less inclined to do the task on the following day. It’s a cycle that perpetuates itself, and it takes conscious effort to put a stop to it.

The habit of pursuing art is no differnet. Gone are the days when the artist could seek a patron as a source of income that kept them fed and clothed while they pursued their vision. Nowadays, to appease the exorbidant rates of utility companies and maintain even the most meager of households, one has to submit themselves to the will of a corporate or small business master. And while the cost of living goes up with shocking regularity, the salary of the day worker often remains the same. Make a single mistake, indulge in a single distraction, and you can expect nothing but disappointment if not scorn from those above you.

Thus it falls to the artist to engage in the habit of pursuing art in one’s spare time. The reduction of a life-long passion to the status of a hobby can be a crippling one. Your dreams limp along, gasping for air and vying for one’s attention admist distractions that require much less effort, input and time. After a long day of disappointment and doubt, a film or game or night out holds a great deal more appeal than even more disappointment and doubt, even if it’s in the form of something you love.

As my big sister was in the habit of saying, “Suck it up and deal with it.”

Without our passions, we’re nothing. We’re empty husks trudging from day to day banging away at insignificant tasks and spewing preprogrammed corp-speak jargon. Living that way isn’t really living. It’s existing. Amoebas exist. We should live.

I know it may seem like a lot of whining or grousing on my part but it’s been made crystal clear to me that I have once again gotten out of the good habit of seizing appropriate opportunities to write. It’s a habit I need to return to and this is my way of expressing that. Maybe somebody reading this will come to a similar realization and re-engage in a discarded good habit that leads them to freedom from a vicious cycle of depression and a dimishing self-image.

We, as individuals and especially as artists, are so much more than cogs in a machine, regardless of what anybody with a higher pay grade might say. It’s necessary for most of us to become a part of that machine just to afford a warm place to live and clean food to eat. But the machine need not be our lives. It doesn’t have to be our reason for being. There’s a reason people put faith in things that cannot be proven by science, other than ignorance or stupidity – there’s hope in the notion that there’s something more than what we see every day, because most of what we see every day can be pretty damn depressing.

I know I may never really succeed at writing. I know I may be doomed to working thankless, underpaid jobs for which I have little passion until my body begins to fail, my mind starts to unravel and all of the fire in my heart goes out.

That’s not going to stop me from trying, dammit.

I just have to try when I’m not getting paid to do something else.

Be A Pitch Machine

Courtesy Kollewin

This is going to be yet another one of those “advice I should follow myself before I dispense it” posts.

I, like many other authors, have been rejected far more often than I’ve been accepted. From big publishing houses to small press folks, I’ve heard the word NO at least a dozen times before hearing a single YES. It’s something for you aspiring young novelists wrapping up NaNoWriMo to keep in mind when you have your shiny new novel in hand and want to see it get ink.

It applies to other writers, too, or writers between novels or edits of novels looking to keep the writing muscles in tip-top shape without engaging in exercises of long prose. Because let’s face it, you can’t run marathons all the time. The best way to stay in shape is sprints around the track. It keeps the muscles primed and ready for that long haul of 26 miles. For the writer, that means short works. Stories, articles, what have you.

That brings me to the image above. For the uninitiated, that is a pitching machine. And that is what you (and I) need to be.

Be it to anthologies of fiction or magazines like The Escapist or any other type of publication looking for fresh new work to populate their pages, you won’t get in the door if you don’t knock on it. Repeatedly. I’m not saying to be annoying, nor should you just fire off a pitch the moment an idea pops into your head. Your pitch should be just like any other work you produce: refined, edited, free of error and as note-perfect and punch-to-the-guttish as possible. That is to say, someone reading it should feel the wind go out of their lungs in at least a metaphorical sense when they realize what you’re getting at and what you can do for them.

Still, one pitch is never enough. It should never be enough. Find places to pitch, especially if they have multiple issues coming, and pitch as much as you can. Again, you don’t want to get to the point of being annoying or fire off pitches half-formed and smelling slightly of bacon grease and day-old coffee. Strike the right balance between camping outside of their place looking through their windows with envy and donning the black tie and white short-sleeved shirt with pitch in hand, ringing their doorbell over and over until they open the door to find you there with the creepiest smile ever on your face asking if they’ve heard your idea yet.

Okay, I’m straining metaphors to the point of them breaking so I think I’m making my point. At least, I hope I am. If nothing else, your pitches should be repeated, persistent, polite and nothing like this. They should not be rambling, off-the-cuff affairs with bad humor and superfluous language that obfuscate the fact that you have nothing to say.

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