Character Ingredients

I only have time for a quick post this evening, but I'd like to use it to share a quote from Isabel Allende that I've had written on a scrap of paper and shoved in a desk drawer for many years now. When asked what she believes every character needs, she said, "A complete biography, a defined personality, and an individual voice."I'm not the best at any of these things; I tend to let the story draw it out by force (e.g. if I dropped Amarinne in a pool of sharks, what memories would she draw upon, what aspects of self would be revealed, and what choice words would she utter? Rather than meditate on these things without a specific situation as background).Allende, of course, seems to have no difficulty in following her own suggestions, as her characters are some of the most vivid I've ever...

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Posted in: Allende,characters,inspiration

Books, Books, Books

I assume we all read. Reading is important to writing, it is food for our process. They inform us as to what the industry is doing, and are the best escape created.Well, movies/shows and video games also begin to offer writers' inspiration. Suddenly books are a part of a wider venue for written media than has ever existed before. This is affecting how books are sold and even what books are. While most people--especially us bookworms--do not buy e-books, that there is a trend toward e-books is certain. They won't take over by tomorrow. But certainly as far as nonfiction goes, e-books make sense.What about novels?I think its a question of context, and personally I'm waiting for technology to improve/integrate a bit more before I branch out to "e-books." Yes, branch out--as a reader...

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Faces

I’m pretty bad at visualizing things. When it comes to writing, this means that although I don’t have difficulty with superficial physical characteristics (long black hair, deep blue eyes, etc), I’m hopeless at putting it all together in my mind and knowing what my characters actually look like.Years ago, I tried to draw them, but unless my stories were populated with misshapen lumps, it didn’t do me much good. When I write, I see the scene happening in my mind. If I can’t see the characters clearly, I can’t accurately transcribe what they’re doing.This weekend, I realized that I had lost several hours to scouring google images for the cast of Aya’s Wings. I had already found a few of them months ago, but I wanted to round out the rest. The...

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Posted in: characters,drawing,inspiration,writing

The American Labour System: the Anti-Art System?

First of all, I want to apologise for not posting last week's blog entry. It was a very busy week, and I was completely out of it.What I wanted to discuss this evening is writing in programming and Web development.I've been a novice computer geek for the last two to three years, so there is a lot that I still have yet to learn about the technology. But what I have learned is that the skills of a writer can be transferred over to programming and Web development. When I say "programming," I include software development. Software is just a type of program that performs a tool- or application-like function and therefore a specific kind of task. For example, word processing software performs writing and editing tasks of human language (as opposed to machine language).Like stories, articles...

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Hurdles

If you had told me five years ago, while I was buried deep in a high school life I hated, that I would someday be delivering a three hour lecture, I would have probably run in terror. Nonetheless, that’s what I did last week and, in my opinion, I think I did a pretty decent job of it. True, I had been prepping for weeks. I read multiple books on the subject, sifted through a stack of articles, watched tapes, consulted professors. In the end, though, it all came together and if I stuttered through parts of it, my speech was mostly unobstructed. Great, you may say, but what does this have to do with writing? Well see, for the past month of so, this lecture has been my life (not entirely true: I did have a couple of midterms in there to jazz things up a bit). Every spare moment...

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Posted in: life,writing

The Writing Life

How does one become a full time writer? What is required?The biggest and hardest thing is time management. For me, that's meant kicking myself in the rear and getting myself out of the house. My house is inducing laziness, making me feel like a bum. I need to be out and about in order to accomplish things. You know, like actually writing.Because that's the next thing you have to do, is write. But, as I'm learning, it isn't about writing "anything," as much as it's about writing "everything."Only, the "everything" has to be specific: nonfiction and fiction--stuff I have the interest in researching and writing. If I want to be a full-time writer, I have to do both.I have to set up a platform of things I am intending to focus on, and when I publish articles these become part of this process....

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Posted in: publishing,research,writing

Back to Basics

This week I wanted to discuss something most of us learned in freshman english: the three basic plots. When I was fourteen I found this whole idea terribly depressing. Not only had every story already been told, precluding any chance of originality, but there were only three of them?  The Universe was unspeakably cruel. Now, some years later, I find this truth fascinating. All stories as we know them are windows into the three conflicts of human experience.  Just to review, the plots are these: 1. Man Against Nature.  Obviously this encompasses all stories dealing with terrain, weather, and animal life. Think Moby Dick or Call of the Wild. Though I do not write, and only very occasionally read, such material what I do find interesting in them is the trick of the writing. Novels...

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A building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it.

All this talk of death and different types of love stories is a result, I think, of me recently seeing the movie V for Vendetta. This is my new favorite movie – seriously, why had I never seen it before? It’s got everything I love in a story: drama, romance, disfigurement, death, and revolution. V’s death, however, got me thinking. I guess that was a spoiler. But the actions that V takes in the first few scenes of the movie cannot realistically end in anything other than his death. Once the first bomb explodes, we know he’s a goner. Likewise, it was a pretty good bet that Evey, V’s at first unwilling accomplice, will make it to the end suffering only the death of her illusion. Thus, while the ending of the movie is tragic, anything else would have been a betrayal of the story....

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Posted in: characters,death,dickens,kundera

The Spontaneous Art of Handwriting

My laptop's adapter went out on me and so I've been without a laptop for a whole week and because of that I've been forced to do my outside writing by hand. Normally that's how I write my first drafts anyway. This is especially so with my fiction. Then after I've revised my first draft to death, and therefore to the p0int where I can no longer squeese in any more revisions because each page is already scrawled over with them, I'll type everything into my computer and save it on my flash drive.Now, you're probably saying, "In this modern technologically advanced age, with all kinds of electronic devices that you can so quickly write your material with--electronic devices such as desktop computers, laptops (or notebooks), mobile text messaging gadgets, and word processing software--why would...

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An Aside

Today was an important day for California young people. Lots of my friends protested the rising of student fees, and the cuts to the entire college system in California. About seven years ago, I and a bunch of other community college students at the time, marched on the State Capitol. We didn't want the student fees to rise from $11 a unit. I was interviewed for Sacramento City college's newspaper, the Express, a year later, when the discussion again arose.Now, the situation is dire. California State University at Sacramento is experiencing furloughs that affect courses and teaching. Due to record unemployment (of which I am a hidden statistic, I have not collected unemployment, and I am almost a year out of work) many of us are returning to school. I am currently re-enrolled...

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Writing Rules

A friend recently posted a list of various authors' rules for writing. I, being the geek I am, love reading them. Some, like Margaret Atwood's #3: 'Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch pieces of wood or your arm will do', make me laugh. Others, like Helen Dunmore's #4: 'Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work throw it away', are painfully hard to acknowledge. (Throw it away? What do you mean throw it away?) There are more that are contradictory, depending on who you decide to listen to and more yet that I'm pretty sure don't make sense at all. And then there are ones like Elmore Leonard's #3: 'Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in'. This one has become...

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"Of love, Daroga. I am dying of love."

From love, we move to death (how dramatic!).There are few things more perilous than being one of my characters. Chances are good that you’ll either die or be horribly mutilated by the end of the story (if you weren’t deformed to begin with). I’m not sure why I kill off so many characters. It’s not because I don’t like happy endings. Quite the contrary, actually – all of my favorite books have characters go through extreme trial, but then (for the most part) they come out all right. Books with sad endings break me. I cry over them; I ruminate. The ending of His Dark Materials, for example, while not strictly tragic, depressed me enough that I didn’t read another book for months. It’s a grieving process.So why do my characters have a penchant...

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Posted in: death,writing