This is Lazy Seal. My wife loves Lazy Seal. The entire time we were at Mystic Aquarium this past weekend, that seal didn’t move. It lay on that rock, sunning itself, near cool water if it wanted a swim. It knows a human will be coming around eventually to feed it fish. It doesn’t have to hunt or defend its territory. That seal’s got it made.
There are days when we, as humans, feel like Lazy Seal. The humidity goes into triple digits, the temperature skyrockets, oil falls from the sky to kill the wildlife and we question the relevance of our actions. We do this mostly by being unmotivated to do anything significant. We play games. We look for amusements on the Internet. We sit, we sweat, we suffer from lethargy.
Unfortunately, unlike Lazy Seal, we don’t have it made. (Not all of us do, anyway) We have to work. We have to do something to make money. Bill collectors, landlords and creditors are unsympathetic towards lethargy. So, we need to fight it. We need to get off the couch, peel ourselves away from the leather office chair that faces our monitors, and go out to do something.
This is something I could use help with, folks. I’ve been feeling rather lethargic lately. How do you fight it? What sort of diet keeps the lazy seal feeling at bay? Should I be working out more? Lay some knowledge on me.
I only own one copy of The Elements of Style. Some own quite a few. My copy is about as old as I am, the Third Edition published in 1979. I took it with me this morning instead of my manuscript, just to brush up on writing well as opposed to just writing a good yarn. I was reminded why I should make it a point to read this book as often as possible.
The Elements of Style for writers is what Musashi’s Book of Five Rings is for martial artists, what Sun-Tzu’s Art of War is for strategists. It is taut, direct writing on the subject of writing. It doesn’t over-complicate and remains on point, and it’s conciseness means the book is small enough to carry just about anywhere.
This also means there’s a bit of self-reflection at work. The book, which discusses good writing in terms of brevity, grammatical correctness and active voice, is written so that the work is brief, grammatically correct, and active. You don’t just read the book to learn about good writing, you read it because it is good writing.
That’s been my experience with The Elements of Style, at least. What are some of yours? How many copies do you own? Is this the first you’ve heard of it?
Aron Anthony is a freelance Graphic Designer, writer, and yoga instructor. He has written several short stories and two books, which received a number of impressive rejection letters. His third book, it on it’s second editing for publication. Lost Gods is a dark humorous sci-fi/fantasy adventure. A re-telling of Olympian mythology, Lost Gods is the story of two brothers, separated at birth who must come together to overthrow their tyrannical father, Don Cronus, a notorious CEO, Mafia Boss and possibly a God.
Interested readers and critiques should contact the author for a free manuscript.
Taonow@gmail.com
Today’s Blue Ink Alchemy guest topic is Zen and the art of writing.
It is said that Zen is unknowable, it cannot be defined. Yet oddly enough Webster’s has managed to define it.
Zen (noun): An approach to religion, arising from Buddhism, that seeks religious enlightenment by meditation in which there is no consciousness of self.
Note : Deliberately irrational statements are sometimes used in Zen to jar persons into realizing the limits of the common uses of the intellect. One well-known example is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
Sounds like a pretty good definition to me. Did those monks I lived with at the Zen monastery lie to me? I wouldn’t put it past them, a bunch of grumpy bath-robe wearing bald Asians. No sense of humor whatsoever.
The first part, I’m sure you have all heard before; no consciousness of self. I know it sounds like some kind of new age hippy thing; drop off your ego, expand your mind. But if you’re to succeed in any creative endeavor this is pretty important. Trust me, if you’re a professional artist and you still have an ego, it will quickly get crushed. That’s because art is subjective. This is one of the key principals of Zen. Every point of view is extremely narrow, and the same thing that one person thinks is brilliant another will see as utter crap.
The point is that the only way to stay sane is to not be attached to one view point or one particular idea. I once read a book when I was seventeen called Staying Sane in the Arts.
Honestly I have no idea what the book was about and the fact that I was reading something about trying to stay sane at seventeen probably says it all. However the implication is that it’s hard to stay sane in the arts. Most of the time you have no external validation or structure and one thing that seems brilliant, can quickly seem like drivel when you wake up, hung over, in Tijuana, and the only fan of your writing is a 300 peso prostitute named Jose.
This is the heart of Zen. You need the awareness and flexibility to adapt to the strangest situations that life and your art will inevitably take you.
This brings us to the second part of the equation. Using seemingly irrational devices to jar a person into realizing the limits of the intellect. What does that mean? Again I have no idea. Fortunately Webster’s gives the example of a Koan, or Zen riddle; what is the sound of one hand clapping. I don’t know what that means either and even if I did I’d have to kill you. Those monks are pretty uptight about that kind of thing.
Essentially the idea is to take seemingly unrelated ideas and turn them into a tool to enlighten. If this sounds familiar, that’s a common technique of writers. Take some random ideas and try to make a story from them. Let’s try this, shall we? I thought of the first three articles I came across today.
While I was waiting for a video to load I had to watch this horrible commercial from AT&T. Perhaps I’m the only one that finds it disturbing but a video depicting the world becoming covered by a shining bronze colored substance may not the best idea when we have an oil spill in the gulf threatening to do the same thing. But I digress. Now we have our problem.
The second item of interest was the androgynous person Justin Bieber, apparently a pop-idol among both twelve year old girls and lesbians. He unwisely had a contest to see where his fans would send him on his world tour date.
Those savvy fans have decided his first stop should be North Korea. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31749_162-20009827-10391698.html Since North Korea doesn’t have internet access I would presume that the dictator Kim Jong-il is behind this nefarious scheme to lure Bieber to North Korea and keep him as his lesbian slave. One can only hope. Now we have our antagonist and protagonist, though for the life of me I can’t figure out which is which. A certain amount of ambiguity is always best when developing your characters.
The final element is a story about Paul the Psychic Octopuss, who is now an impressive 7-1 with his predictions of World Cup Soccer outcomes.
Paul can act as the side kick to Bieber, and a wise advisor.
I don’t know about you but I’d read that story. Anything could happen, who knows maybe you will write it. Feel free to use my idea and post your stories! I can’t tell you where to go with this, but i do know how the story should end. So I will leave you this Koan, a Zen story if you will. I’m sure you will agree, this says it all.
Justin looked over the dark waters covered with oil. The cities burned across the horizon and walls of black smoke reached into the sky, blotting out the sun. He had escaped, but at what price? Kim Jong had been true to his word, he’d spared no living thing in his mad war to return Justin to his loving embrace. Justin knew what Helen of Troy must of felt like as she looked at the smoking ruins of the armies that had fought for her release. History repeats itself.
He felt Paul move a golden lock of hair from his eyes and wipe a smoke streaked tear from his face with a gentle caress of his tentacle. Justin reached up and patted the Octopus, perched on his head.
“You were right Paul,” Justin sniffed. “You were right about everything. But then, you always are.”
Let’s say we have an idea. You might have the nugget of a story, the core of a sweeping epic. How best do you bring the narrative to life? You could just start tossing words on the wall and see what sticks. However, the problem with shoulder-rushing your way into a new project without a plan is that it can quickly grow out of control.
This is something known as ‘scope creep’ in circles of design firms. The best way to control it is to lay down a few ground rules. You give yourself a deadline, set parameters for the project, and make plans for what might happen if those parameters or that deadline get exceeded.
It’s the same for writing. Before you begin a story, one of the best things to do (in my opinion) is to lay down a projected word count. This is particularly important for shorter forms of fiction. If you want to write a short story of no more than 2000 words, only to finish writing and find that your story ended up being 2345 words in length, that’s 345 words you need to cut. It helps maintain your focus on the end goal of the narrative and makes the editorial process easier.
Let me turn the mike over to y’all. How do you control scope creep in your writing? Are there things you do before, during or after you write to keep things on the right track?
This week’s Escapist is talking about constructive criticism. Yahtzee himself chimed in on criticism on one point:
Criticism is a powerful force for good. Nothing ever improves without coming to terms with its flaws. Without critics telling us what’s stupid and what isn’t, we’d all be wearing boulders for hats and drinking down hot ebola soup for tea. – Zero Punctuation: Overlord 2
I could make all sort of analogies for criticism. There’s the bonsai tree example, the fat on a steak visual, the sanding of a bat to remove its splinters for a nice clean hit; I could go on. But suffice it to say that the best criticism is one that sees what a work is going for and points out the flaws so that the crux of the work can be improved while things that don’t work can be discarded.
Declaring something to be absolute crap is a great way to appear critical and level up on the Internet, so that’s what some critics will go for. This should not, however, deter the creative mind from letting criticism getting in the way of creating something. Even if said criticism is coming from that selfsame mind.
Even if you’re not looking at your art as a means of income, and it’s just something you do for fun, critics shouldn’t deter you from trying to create something if you’ve the mind to try it. However, some criticism is meant to be constructive, while other criticism becomes destructive very quickly. There’s a world of difference between “This sketch needs work,” and “Your art is horrible and will never improve.”
It comes down to a difference in mentality. Some people want to cultivate dreams in this world, to help bring a new vision to life. This requires a lot of effort, though, more than some people are willing to put into a creative endeavor, and it can be a scary thing. Like the man said, there will always be mediocrity out there, people who can’t deal with the extra percentage of effort some put into what makes them passionate. That, I feel, is where a lot of destructive criticism comes from. But I could be wrong.
Anyway, you can’t be afraid to put your work out there. Good criticism will help your work get better, and bad criticism can pretty much be ignored. Just like there is such a thing as good & bad writing or good & bad film-making, there’s good & bad criticism.
