William's Cool Writing School

Runaway Train

2012-01-18T10:12:00.000-08:00

I have friends who compare running RPGs to hanging onto the front of a freight train and trying to quickly lay down track before they derail completely. I find that this comparison is only true for people who are just starting out writing this type of game. After a few sessions, the GM will get better at writing stories that aren’t so rigid and strict. In fact, people smarter than I have written very informative articles on how to structure an adventure for maximum playability.

When I first started writing, I very much over-thought the whole process. I had a complicated array of if/then “switches.” Completing quest A would yield different results if the players had previously completed quest B, and still different results if they'd completed quest C and B together. In time I learned that I was exerting myself for no meaningful gain. Work smarter, not harder, as the saying goes. Anyway, wasn't this supposed to be fun? Programming a game in a word processor is laborious and draining. Many times, content was skipped completely, meaning that I'd wasted effort. Something had to change!

This is another big departure for regular writing vs. RPG writing; the fact that stuff can get skipped. Only in an author's wildest nightmares might a whole chapter get overlooked. So much character development and plot, gone. Just like that. How could a story retain its shape? How could you have a finale? What if somehow the finale was skipped? This is why RPG writers have to employ something called nonlinear writing.

It's not as strange as it sounds. If you've ever thought about the process of writing a script for a movie, it merits comparison.

A few years ago I was completely in love with the idea of becoming a big-shot Hollywood film director. Because my obsessions are a little more “advanced” than some people, I like to learn everything about something before I move forward. During my research (a fancy way of saying watching every “making-of” on every DVD ever made), I learned that most movies and television shows are shot completely out of sequence. That is, the script is carved up into discrete, filmable chunks and then shot out of order. Lord of the Rings is famously known (by me anyway) to have filmed the very last shot in the whole movie during the first few weeks of principle photography. The actors hardly knew each other at that point, and now they had to act as if they had just finished throwing the ring into the Crack of Doom.

"Was your name Shane or Sean?"

Like movies, it helps if the author can think of the story as a series of discreet scenes. Unlike movies, RPG scripts are not written as a whole and then carved up later. It's much easier to have a strong overarching narrative that connects separate “scenes” together into a whole. This way the players can visit the scenes in almost any order and still get a grip on the overall story. So what if they skip the fight with the cave troll that was supposed to happen early on? The GM can just make it come in later and use it for the last fight of the game. Problem solved.

Movie Review: Cowboys and Aliens

2012-01-12T00:00:00.000-08:00

As I have done in the past, I've decided to review a movie. To quote myself in my review of Daybreakers: “Perhaps the most prevalent and popular form of writing today is the kind we see in movies. While many people simply "hate books," nearly everybody watches movies.”

Cowboys and Aliens is a 2011 movie directed by the same guy who made both Iron Man films. It earned a 44% from Rotten Tomatoes, which means it's quite rotten. It also means that it's rated lower than Daybreakers (67%) but much better than 2005's Doom (20%).

Remember his name? I sure don't.

I like to think that the title of the movie was invented when a parent watched his children play with action figures. When I was a kid, I'm pretty sure I made Batman fight aliens. Maybe they'll make that into a movie!

On the surface, the film seems to offer everything I like about Summer movies: Action. Explosions. Harrison Ford. What went wrong? Films that mash up two genres are rare but not unheard of. According to this series of captioned photographs, “[Bladerunner was a] sci-fi and hardboiled film noir; Alien was a haunted house movie [in] outer space.” So it's not like this kind of thing is new.

The problem lies in the way the movie was created, it doesn't blend two films; it is two films. Like dysfunctional siblings, these two movies fight it out to be dominant almost the whole time. In the beginning, it's a fairly boring Western starring James Bond. Halfway through, there's a transition from Western into a pretty serious sci-fi flick. Then for the rest of the movie each genre ruined the suspension of disbelief for the other. Worse still, I got flashbacks of Krull.

If you're not familiar with Krull, watch this trailer.

Like most films with a bloated budget (Matrix 2 and 3, any Star Wars prequel), character development takes the backseat to what Hollywood executives would excitedly refer to as “the Action.” Unfortunately this means that there's no character development of any kind in the beginning of the movie. James Bond wakes up with no memory, so we as the audience are left to solve this “mystery” for ourselves as the film progresses. This is not a J.J. Abrams mystery that leaves the audience with an “I MUST KNOW” desire. This is a slow, plodding and ultimately unimportant side plot that seems to get in the way of the Action.

This explosion is more important than the characters.

In fact, this veiled "mystery" trickles down throughout the entire production (Spoilers ahead). Why are the aliens abducting people if they're only visiting earth to harvest gold? If Olivia Wilde is an alien who can take the form of a human, why can't the other aliens? Is she the last of her race? How come the Indians speak exclusively Chiricahua but can clearly understand English? Was this all an excuse to give Harrison Ford a Chewbacca-like Indian sidekick? Why do the aliens seem so evil?

In a weird twist of fate, the writers of the movie tried to make an ensemble cast of characters, but they don't take the time to develop any of them beyond an initial archetypical doodle, and this includes the main character.

The main character: Jake Lonergan, a mysterious amnesiac who turns out to be just an outlaw with James Bond's prowess for hand-to-hand combat.

Harrison Ford's character: A rich cattle rancher who learns something about himself through the eyes of a young boy while chasing down the aliens.

Olivia Wilde: A mysterious young woman who looks like she wears pajamas for the whole film.

The Preacher: A caricature of what Hollywood thinks ministers in the wild west were like, except he's both Catholic and Christian, but with some distinct humanist vibes.

...And three or four other people whose names you won't know until you read the credits on IMDB!

Probin' time.

This movie was basically a 1.5 million dollar Freddy Wong video, except without the fun Freddy Wong bits. Instead of watching this, watch True Grit and District 9, two much better films that do their genres justice.

The Good:

Great explosions, aliens, effects

James Bond's wrist gadget

The Bad:

The plot is boring

The movie is never as cool as the title made it sound

The characters are undefined and shallow as a hastily-dug mafia grave

The end was much like Krull

It didn't mash up the two genres well
This list of mistakes

Overall: 2/5

The Master is a Slave

2012-01-10T00:00:00.000-08:00

This image is blatant pandering to
my sister in law

Continuing from my previous post, another thing that makes RPGs so different from board games is the notion of a Game Master. I realize that phrase might make some people shudder away in disgust and exclaim, “that's just too nerdy for me!” but I implore those people to continue reading anyway.

As far as I can think, there's nothing quite like having a game master (or GM) running the game. In video games the player is limited by the bounds of the game itself. If you walk to the furthest reaches of the map, you'll find an invisible wall that blocks the way. Books and movies are different because the reader or viewer is effectively on rails for the entire duration. The experience is passive instead of active. This doesn't make it better or worse; just different. The audience has no control of what does or doesn't happen on the screen; they're simply along for the ride.

Meanwhile, sitting at a table with a person who is the author, narrator, voice and personality of the characters is something to behold, especially if it's done well. If a player decides to travel to the farthest reaches of the planet, it's the GM's responsibility to have something suitably surprising waiting there for him to find. This is why I keep stressing the importance of imagination in games. If imagination is limitless, the world is limitless.

Now you can start to see where the difficulty of creating this kind of game can be. In a previous blog I mentioned that RPGs come in books. Most of the time a portion of the book is devoted to explaining the world (also called a “setting”). Essentially a setting is an elaborate list of Do's and Don'ts. A setting could take place in the Wild West, except with strange and grungy magic. It could be like Men in Black. It could be based on My Little Pony.

This guy knows what I'm talking about.

However, people are wild and unruly creatures who desire above all things to get their own way. This was one of the first things I learned when I jumped headfirst into running my first game. It can be frightening; I had spent hours trying to anticipate what a group of three players might do inside a single tavern. Within two minutes of playing they were already doing things I hadn't thought of. This is something I think every writer should experience just once; people like to break things. Look at what happened within a few weeks of the new Star Wars game coming out; people got inside the game and found ways to break it, giving themselves an advantage.

You see, when a person sits down to write a story, they have time to ponder and caress their words and characters. They can carefully sketch and sculpt their style and narrative to suit a certain purpose. This is one of the reasons it takes so long to write things. Compare this to RPGs, where the writer can prep as much as they want but still be fairly unprepared for the game. It doesn't matter how much time an author spent describing the perfect woman; when suddenly asked by a player if she's ever killed a man, all preconceived ideas are quickly called into question and the author has to stop and think. It's this very unpredictability that makes the game both a blessing and a curse.

A New Year, A New Topic

2012-01-07T18:13:00.000-08:00

I was recently asked if I was going to continue writing on this blog. “Of course,” I said. “Why wouldn't I?”

“Oh,” replied my sister, “because you haven't updated in a long time. I was wondering if you'd just abandoned it.”

“But I'm not writing anything,” I said, “except maybe adventures for our roleplaying games.”

“Why don't you just write about those?” she asked. It was a good question. Why don't I?

It's not like my content would change much. Devout readers will remember that I like writing about sci-fi and fantasy. It's not a surprise to hear that all of my gaming sessions are based in similar universes (that is, either fantasy or zombie mayhem, which is kinda sci-fi-ish). I've written two (crappy) novels that were set in a comfortable place between the two genres, but I hesitate to call it Science-Fantasy because another guy has basically defined that genre as something else altogether.

This is more my speed; bizarre.

But where should I start with a blog about roleplaying? There are already several blogs devoted to the mechanics of RPGs, and other still devoted to nothing but adventure creation. I don't really want a blow-by-blow account of a night's events, as I typically find those uninteresting. Because this blog is supposed to be my way of helping random strangers overcome writing hurdles, I think it'd be best if I covered the things I do from the perspective of an aspiring writer. Hopefully this will broaden the appeal of such a blog, ensuring that it can be read by people who might not care much about this kind of entertainment, but also by those who do.

Topic 1: What the eff is a roleplaying game?

Around December of 2010 I was regularly meeting with some friends from math. You can read the account for yourself in more detail. Long story short, I wound up trying to create and run a system of my design (read: poorly conceived) and play a rudimentary adventure with my friends. Well, most of those math friends only lasted as long as the class itself, so at the end of the semester I found myself writing stories for some new players, most of whom were directly related to me.

A few months and one systems change later, I found myself slightly more experienced with this kind of game. I had played board games in the past but I had never been a huge fan (note: this opinion has changed significantly since July 2011, but that's a topic for another blog).

To say that a roleplaying game is like a board game is to do them both injustice. Board games have very clear-cut rules and goals, and typically one player wins. They're made to appeal to a fairly broad audience; they're play-tested rigorously before production, which itself can be expensive. Roleplaying games are typically based around a system of rules, which can vary wildly depending on preference. They're written by one or more people, they're also play-tested, but these games are mostly distributed as a book of rules. There are no boards to print, no cards to make, no wooden chips or bits to include in a box. Some people are baffled by RPGs for this reason; if a board game comes in a box, then how can a roleplaying game come in a book?

Almost every game here is terrible.

So what exactly is a "system?"

Similar to how there are many different makes and models of automobile in the world, there are numerous roleplaying game systems. If I drive a Chevrolet and you drive a Toyota, we're both driving places but we're getting there with a different style. The feel of the cars might be different; the shape of the seats and the layout of the air conditioning controls might vary, but ultimately we're both driving cars.

To continue the analogy, imagine that while you're driving your Toyota, I'm actually driving a completely different kind of vehicle. For instance, a train or airplane. Hopefully now you can start to understand the difference between the Dungeons and Dragons system and something more obscure. For instance, Savage Worlds .

The reason the game comes in a book instead of a box is because most of the game is about imagination. But how is that any fun? Some people think the idea of playing with their imagination is childish and stupid. Perhaps it is, but only as long as they're imagining childish and stupid things. The word imagination (like many other words) has suffered from Disneyfication; when people hear the word "imagination" they hear it in either a mysterious Sleeping Beauty Narrator kind of voice, or Ms. Frizzle shouting "use your imagination, kids!"

Ugh.

The first thing a you need to realize is that imagination can be a very dark and powerful thing. If you've ever read a book then you were subject to some degree of imagination both on the part of the author and from your own mind. Whether your were reading the driest and most boring narration of 15th century European history or the most exciting moments of the Lord of the Rings. Imagination is a part of your life whether you know it or not: If someone asks you what you're thinking of having for dinner, you'll probably look forward into the future with your imagination to see what you might eat. "What sounds good?" really means "what do you imagine yourself eating tonight?"

I googled "imagination"

Imagination isn't complete fabrication, either. When you're thinking, you're really pulling on every experience, conversation and memory in your life, usually with the most recent stuff floating to the surface.

With this in mind, I present you with the most simple explanation of why the heck anyone would waste their time playing a game like this. Essentially the game is one long string of hypothetical scenarios. If I said to you, "imagine that right now, while you're sitting in front of your computer, you look up and see a strange person standing in your doorway. The person is holding a knife and looks murderous.

What would you do?"

I'm not even sure they're playing a game. Looks like a really
terrible family reunion in the heart of the 90's.

Of course not every scenario is so dire, but these kind of scenarios are used frequently, even in things like employee training. This is nothing new to most people. So why is there such a jump in perception when I call something a hypothetical scenario versus when I call something a roleplaying game? A negative stigma brought on by horror stories of kids who killed themselves after playing D&D? The fact that the players of these kinds of games are typically really dorky?

The fact is that tabletop RPGs are still fairly unpopular in the eyes of the mainstream, played only by an obscure underground of people. It's not all number crunching and funny voices; it's one writer creating a space for players to answer questions to hypothetical scenarios. It's this writing aspect that interests me the most.

Lets Rip My Story Apart: What Happens Next

2011-07-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

After careful consideration, I've created a list of Wants and Needs

I Need...
...Stronger driving narrative
...To finish each and every mystery in a given story
...To avoid plot holes (doesn't everyone?)
...To avoid wasting the time of the reader

I Want...

...To be original
...Fantastic, imaginative storytelling that takes readers by surprise, like a burglar
...Really hilarious things to happen to the characters
...Endearing characters
...A world history deep enough to support many more stories

...To be happy with the finished product

I received a very helpful comment from my sister on my previous post; she said,

“One thing I remember about Dower is that it was like a bunch of different inter-related stories in one. Like, you could take any of the sub-stories and make them into their own book, like the inverted universe, or the part where they go into the dreamworld.”

Hmm. I completely agree with her on this. In fact, as long as I'm splitting the story up, I might as well think of what each story is going to be about. There were indeed so many little things (that never truly got explained) that each of them could be their own very short stories, or if I combined a few of the events, a few slightly longer short stories. As long as I'm pulling concepts and plot devices from the story, I might as well make a list. If the main title of every book was Dower then the Subtitles of each sub-book could be (according to things that are simply in the story):

And The Griddle
And The Monster in the Mail
And the Inverted Universe
Destroys the Universe
And The Transference
And The Interdimensional Deck of Cards
And The Dragon Roost
And The Pirates
Goes Memory Hunting
Meets The Rocket Riders

Travels Edward

In the past I've mentioned how exciting book titles can be, and simply seeing all of the potential I could have in chopping up one large story is pleasing to me. Although I probably won't have a naming scheme like this as it seems a little like something more appropriate for children's books, this is enough book-writing to keep me occupied for years, depending on the length of the stories. Of course not all of the stories necessarily have to follow around Dower, who in himself is quite bland, a regular Alice in Wonderland-type character who exists simply to ask questions about the universe so the reader understands things.

In my previous blog, I mentioned that I wanted to have a stronger story-seed (as I called it) for the story. My sister (in her excellent way) also adds,

“Also, that story seed you're talking about is the theme. It's like the moral. It can be something as simple as "a story where the boring main character becomes a hero". You know, character growth. But the story always puts out other little thoughts, like the guy whose appearance changed according to people's expectations. That was a profound little thought about people making snap judgements that aren't right.”

By gum, she's right! I was overlooking the fact that a good story-seed doesn't have to be the initial concept; it can also be the journey of the character or the events in the story. If that's the case, then I don't need quite as much rewriting of the material I like. This is good news indeed.

My only worry is that this isn't going to be like rearranging a few legos into a different-looking lego house; this is going to be like having to make all of the legos, make sure they fit together with the old legos and then assembling them into a different-looking lego house. Lucky for me, I happen to love making legos.

Let Rip My Story Apart: A Diagnostic

2011-07-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Summary of Dower Travels Edward (Spoilers if you know me in real life and actually have a chance of reading the whole thing): While delivering a package to a rich capital city, a mailman accidentally unleashes an unimaginably awful monster. He then time-travels with the Arch-Mage of the city. Time travel happens every so often. Eventually the entire universe is destroyed because of all of this time travel, but the characters are unharmed.

This is literally the most succinct way for me to summarize this 180-page story.

The problem with this story is that it doesn't seem obvious to me that any part of the story is particularly bad; it's that the story as a whole is disappointing and weak with flaws and cracks that meander all throughout the duration of the adventure. This means that the only way I'll ever be able to get anything done is if I knock the thing down to the ground and start again.

My first objection: The story isn't interesting, and it doesn't need to be told. If you think of fairytales or other famous bits of writing, usually there's a sort of seed to the story, the main grain of interest to the tale that is, by itself, pretty interesting.

For instance, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. H.G. Wells's Time Machine. Frankenstein's monster. All of these stories have a story-seed so potent that movie studios seem to be perpetually re-making them. Sometimes they're modernized a bit, or they're in the proper period, and sometimes they're in outer space for no reason. Regardless of the additional trappings, the root of the story remains the same.

A scientist creates a monster who struggles with his own humanity.

A scientist finds a way to transform himself into what he thinks is a bolder version of himself, until this new version of himself is more powerful than his actual self.

The difference being that Dalaran floats and my city is on the ground.

You get the picture. My story (colloquially referred to as Travels) lacks an interesting seed. The reason for this was because it began as a writing exercise during a particularly boring part of a Digital Arts class, written originally as Warcraft fan-fiction (but only for the first four pages). I wanted to write about the ridiculous decadence of the city of Dalaran, a city with more magic than it knows what to do with. I emailed this story to myself to continue writing at home. Knowing the primary danger of fan-fiction (at least for me, personally) is that there is a very real danger that I won't always be interested in the game, I preemptively changed the universe to an original creation so it would last longer. After the initial description of world was written, I just kept going even though I probably should have stopped, satisfied with a bit of a job well done.

This kind of problem isn't unique to the written word. Recently there was a movie called Skyline that was directed by the brothers Strause. These guys were famous for making really good special effects in their commercials for Coca-Cola and Gatorade. Some movie executive thought it would be a great idea to hand these guys a hundred million dollars to make their own movie. What resulted was humiliating. You see, these guys were great special effects artists, but not necessarily great writers. I believe their creative process involved creating massive special effects sequences first, and later trying to write a plot that involved all of these things. Sounds like another movie I've seen.

Also during the writing, I had lots of other small hooks that I thought would be interesting in the story. One of them is that the main character has a sort of useless X-Men-like power that lets him “sense” money of any kind nearby. It was an interesting idea, but ultimately not enough to hang a whole story on. Another was that I had a man whose appearance would change based on the expectations of the person viewing him. That is, if they were expecting him to be an old man, that's how he would appear to them. I played it as a handicap, later exploiting it for his benefit. But still, this isn't Storytelling Gold.

Interestingly, I also had a few Inception-like chapters in which the characters had to enter the memory of the main character to recover a suppressed memory. I wrote it two years before the movie.

I think I got too hung up on the small details that I lost sight of the larger story. Here are my goals for this rewrite:

• Start with an interesting story-seed; make it strong enough to hang a story on

• Eliminate pointless plot threads and plot holes; consider shortening it into a short story

• In general, tighten up the graphics

I guess for this rewrite, I have to find a seed that could be a central root of the story. If I had to take a pick, I'd say that time travel was an overarching theme, or perhaps terrorism via sending monsters in the mail. I'm not trying to write a commentary on anything, and I don't have a particularly compelling Twilight Zone hook (which is typically how I come up with my other stories).

Without further ado, here's the first section I'm looking at.

The city of Malara had a certain ring to it. However, the name didn't. When Dower described it later, he would say that the city "seemed like someone had hooked it up to an electrical current," but would add that "the name Malara just wasn't very appealing; it sounds like Malaria." Of course, both were true; the name Malara did sound a little bit like malaria.

It was very much as if the city had a charge, except it wasn't electrical. Although the city did have a rather robust electricity wiring system; it was used to power everything that wasn't powered by magic, which wasn't much. The hum that Dower described was caused by the throbbing magical pollution that hung over the city like fog. In fact, there were some places in the city that the magic had actually caused fog. It was dense, hot, and it sometimes smelled like strawberries and ozone combined in some kind of revolting, magical fruit salad. The mages couldn't be bothered to deal with the fog for most everyone in the city was too busy being selfish to care. Fortunately, the city was built on the coast, so the fog usually washed out to sea.

Yep. This was once composed entirely inside a gmail message. Hopefully you can tell the kind of whimsical tone I was going for with the narrative; a blatant imitation of Terry's Pratchett's Discworld writing style. That is, the way the story is told is usually more interesting than the story itself. Sorry mister Pratchett, but it's true. This brings me to my next concern with the story, which you'll get to learn about on Independence Day.

Upcoming Series: Lets Rip My Story Apart

2011-06-29T18:25:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I finished writing my second-ever novel, and the first-ever one I was proud of. It's a confusing book about characters doing seemingly-entertaining things in a seemingly-entertaining universe. Upon re-reading it recently, I realized several things, the first of which was that the story itself was quite bad. The second was that it badly needs to be re-tooled, re-written or scrapped completely.

Here's where things get fun for you, gentle reader; I'm going to be taking Steven King's advice from On Writing. I'm going to murder my darlings, (meaning my story), and I'm going to do it in public, neighbors be damned! This Friday I'll be posting the first bit, ~~and hopefully I can stick with it this time~~. It'll be a learning experience for everyone!

To avoid accidentally getting the book stolen and published (as if) from this blog, I'm going to be editing select "problematic" segments, completely out of order. That way the thief will actually have to put some effort into their theft.

Breezy Writing (Originally written in April, 2009)

2011-06-24T21:25:00.000-07:00

A Black Hole

The ship was being pulled toward the black hole, completely unable to save itself. The crew, naturally, was in quite a panic. Captain Marcus, who was usually quite cool-headed, wasn't himself; of course, if your ship was about to plummet into a black hole and then be compressed into singularity, you'd be worried too. No one had ever gone through and lived, or so the science books claimed. Captain Marcus didn't have much use for that kind of knowledge, as he thought of it as defeatist rubbish.

Flint, the ship's sole remaining mechanic, was the least panicked of those on board. Although he knew all of the science behind black holes, and then some, he felt a sudden lightness. This was, in all likelihood, due to the drugs he had taken moments before, washed down with the strongest liquor aboard the ship, which Flint had brewed himself. It also might have been gasoline.

There was a sound like whales mating, which of course would have been much more frightening, as the ship entered the tear in space. The metal and rivets groaned their complaint, a loud, jarring, scraping roar that became upsetting after only a moment.

"It just figures," Flint thought, his drug-addled mind momentarily pulling him back to the real world, "I just bought that new boat."

The rest of the crew were experiencing similar thoughts, although none of theirs involved boats, and only a few of them were affected by drugs and liquor. The groaning of the ship increased in volume, bringing with it bone-rattling vibration, which served to make what remained of the crew's lives somewhat more uncomfortable, except for Flint, who found it soothing to his head, which had begun to hurt.

It didn't take long for the ship to make it through. In fact, the crew was rather surprised to find that they were not only still alive, but the ship seemed to be in one piece. The view screens didn't seem to work, but there was a single window that Captain Marcus had had installed because he "didn't trust the technology very much."

Through the window, which everyone had promptly crowded around, they could see the space on the other side of space, which turned out to be white. As regular space is black as night, of course inverted space is white. It was much like being in a Microsoft Word document, or a blank sheet of canvas. The stars shone like black rubies in the white expanse of space.

"Of course," said Flint to the gathered crew, "there's probably air our here as well, since our space has none."

Strangely, the crew found that to be a rather logical conclusion, and before anyone could stop him, Ensign Privy had flung open the bay door and stepped out into space. He had failed to realize that, since our space has no gravity, negative space would, and he fell until he hit a planet, some three-hundred million miles away. The fall wouldn't kill him but the starvation would. The people on the planet were very much like the people on ours, except they didn't care about saving their planet, and they respected one another. So actually, it wasn't anything like our planet.

Movie Review: Doom (2005)

2011-03-19T18:40:00.000-07:00

There's an old joke that says the best parts of a movie are usually shown in the trailer. This isn't true here, because most of the parts you see in the trailer weren't good.

Lets get it out of the way; this movie is bad. This movie is a cash-in; a “didn't-need-to-be-made” movie. The writing, acting, set design and nearly everything else is mediocre and bland. But what were you expecting? It's based on a 1993 video game of the same name, and video game movies are almost always bad! But bad movies need love too, which is why I'm watching it. I also watched the Mummy 3 around the same time, so I might do a review on that later.

As always, if you plan on seeing this movie (for whatever reason) I'm gonna spoil just about everything. The movie is five years old at this point, so it's not exactly fresh news.

Prepare to be amazed

The movie begins with a fairly original take on the Universal Studios logo; instead of Earth it's Mars, which might very well be the most original part of the movie. The plot begins with a hallway full of scientists running in terror from an Unseen Terror. We meet the head scientist named Doctor Carmack (named after the co-founder of id Software, John Carmack) who is apparently eaten by the monster. Cut to a roomful of what Hollywood imagines U.S. Marines to act like. They're all boring character archetypes, from the typical Black stereotypes, to the token religious guy who wears a cross, carries a Bible and quotes that handful of Bible verses that the general public will recognize. Their names are even horribly standard things like Sarge, Reaper and “The Kid.” Look at the top billed actors and their character names. LOOK AT THEM.

"Mars looks surprisingly similar to a featureless cement bunker!"

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," says the religious character, not bothering to finish the rest of the verse.

"Hey, I know that!" says a random audience member, "that's from the Bible! Why's that guy carving a cross into his arm? Christians ARE crazy!"

This merry band of marines are only moments away from what they call “R&R time” which is an excuse for this perverted character to wear a flowery shirt and for another man to play the chunkiest game system since the Sega Nomad. This is strange, because this is supposed to be something like 45 years in the future.

He supplies 90% of the R rating! What a delightful character!

Cool technology -- for 1985

Before long, the marines are sent to something called the Ark, an ancient underground portal from Earth to Mars built by ancient humans (or something, they don't go into much more detail). I'll pause to say this: In the movie there were a few seemingly-interesting science fiction ideas like the aforementioned Ark and later on, a nano-wall. Strangely, I got the feeling that these ideas were probably stolen in large part from other, better science fiction books and movies. Nothing else in the movie is original, and so I suspect plagiarism.

You need the Green keycard

Basically the Ark is a convenient tool to cut down on the three (or is it five?) month trip it would actually take someone on Earth to get to Mars. Upon arrival at Mars, the marines discover that everything is... fine. Scientists and families are going about their lives, business as usual, with no apparent threat to be found! Hmm. That changes soon enough, though.

This is the "Ark" transport. It's like Galaxy Quest, except you barf once you're there.

Quickly, people start getting killed in surprisingly boring ways, including that nano-wall I mentioned. I guess I can explain it now; it's a wall that can turn transparent to let people pass through. While this initially sounds like a cool idea, I realize that there are several flaws with this design, including one that occurs during the movie:

1: What's so bad about a regular door?

2: What happens if the power dies and your door/wall won't close or open completely? (Seen in the movie)

3: Why add this door if your special effects budget can't produce a very good effect?

4: What's so bad about a regular door?!

The answer to all of these is this:

So you can make your rubber monster get trapped in the wall.

That's right: This entire technology was developed so it could produce some cheap thrills in this one scene. It's used in a later scene, apparently unable to seal completely and letting monsters get at the main characters. I hope my tax dollars didn't pay for that!

Here's the wall when it's in "door" mode

Anyway, eventually they discover that it's not really demons breaking through, like it was in the games. Rather, it's a virus that the scientists made that will turn you into a monster or a super-human based on how good of a person you are. Nevermind the fact that they completely disregard the lore of the game (Hell breaking through on Mars); nevermind the fact that many people have wildly varying definitions of what it means to be a "good person;" instead, lets focus on why exactly scientists would have a need of such a virus. In the movie, it's explained that there's some kind of archaeological dig site on mars that has turned up "neanderthal skeletons" (even the evolutionists are scratching their head on that one), who happen to have 24 chromosomes instead of the usual 23.

We have 46 chromosomes, guys. FORTY SIX. The only part of you that has 23 'somes are the cells used for reproduction. Thank YOU, biology! I guess they could have meant 24 PAIRS of chromosomes, which would equal 48 total, but that would just mean a person would have an extra toe or something. Hmm.

Wait, WHAT?

Biology complaints: Complete.

Anyway, because of this amazing "synthetic chromosome," these ancient Martian people could live long, heal faster than Wolverine and were excellent at slalom and long-jumping. I might've made up that last part. Soon, the hero character (Eomer from Lord of the Rings or Bones from J.J. Abrams Star Trek) is exposed to the serum and turns into what is essentially an X-man, while the Rock starts to turn into one of those creatures. They fight, good wins, the end. Lets dissect some writing!

This expression represents my thoughts on this movie exactly

You can barely see the Rock because this movie is dark most of the time

This movie seems to have been made around one important feature: Lets say Carmack's name as much as possible. Which they do about twenty times during the movie. They even try to make Carmack more important than any crazy scientist has a right to be. He doesn't have "Doc Brown" importance. In fact, he doesn't even have "R2-D2" importance. All he does is send a transmission for help in the first scene, and later turns into a crazy monster and attacks people. It's like the film was written by someone who had never written anything before. IMDB informs me that it took two guys to write this!

Shame shame, I really DO know your name.

The character development for literally every character in the movie is non-existant. Apart from learning their ridiculous names, as a viewer, I didn't care when Duke gets pulled through a grate to his death, or when the Rock (Spoilers again!) shoots The Kid for insubordination.

"Who are these people again?" I thought, yawning.

The plot itself follows the games well enough, I suppose. I mean, Doom isn't exactly known for its amazing story, but just because something is based on a boring license doesn't mean it has to be terrible. It's still rigidly formulaic. Marines sweep location for monster. Monster kills marines. One or two escape. Cue sequel? It worked well for Predator, Aliens, and countless other movies that followed this exact formula, but this movie didn't succeed in any way, and I'm pretty sure there's never gonna be a sequel. Oh yeah, and there's the first-person-shooter part, which is laughably ridiculous.

A portion of the movie revolves around Eomer's relationship with his sister (pictured below). As far as I can tell, Karl Urban (the actor who plays Eomer) is a New Zealander while his "sister" in the film is from London. The only thing they have in common is that they're faking American accents in a crappy movie. Otherwise, the writers try feebly (and consequently, fail completely) to make the characters reconcile their differences (which aren't really shown to the audience to begin with) and make them grow as characters. It's strange, because that's the only "love" story you get in the movie. Frankly, the movie didn't NEED a leading man hanging out with his little sister for the whole movie. It's not as important as the killing.

"I'm really British, you foolish Yanks!"

Now, I played Doom 3 when it came out in 2004. It's not the best game in the world: lots of shooting, lots of zombies popping out of magic closets right behind you, et cetera. Weirdly, if they had taken the exact script from that game and filmed it, it would have been a better movie than this. My verdict:

The Good:

The actors did the best they could with what they were given

Cool references to the games (you see a yellow door, a green keycard, the BFG and famous monsters from the game)

The Universal Mars logo was neat

The Bad:

The Writing, cinematography, set design, plot, characterization, coloration, prop quality

Movie is so dark that you can hardly see most of the time

The characters have no common sense

Has surprisingly little to do with source material aside from the name

Mediocre special effects, rubber suits

1/5

Movie Review: Daybreakers

2011-03-06T19:54:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the most prevalent and popular form of writing today is the kind we see in movies. While many people simply "hate books," nearly everybody watches movies. Since the rise of Netflix and Hulu, I for one find myself watching quite a few more movies than I used to, mostly because I can do it via Netflix Instant, which I love dearly.

The best way for a person to really digest a movie is to take it apart and think about it, and that's just what I intend to do. Today I'm examining Daybreakers, a movie from 2009 that earned an only-alright 67% from Rotten Tomatoes.

While it initially seems like the movie is trying to jump on the "vampires are awesome" bandwagon that so many others are trying to get on, this movie actually what one reviewer called "a non-sparkly vampire movie." In fact, it's so far removed from the romanticized vampires of today that it comes off more like a zombie movie or the old black-and-white Dracula films. Vampires aren't good, and this movie goes to great lengths to show that it's not something you should aspire to be.

"Is there any way that you could fry that bag of blood?"

Be warned; if you're planning on watching this, I'm telling you now that I'm gonna spoil pretty much everything.

This movie was written and directed by two Australian guys, Michael and Peter Spierig. As a result, the movie has (perhaps) a slightly different feel than regular American movies, though all of the actors are still speaking in American accents.

In case you decided not to watch the trailer at the top of this page, the story goes like this: In the future, the entire world has been transformed into vampires. As a result, humans are used exclusively for their blood; they're put into these (frankly disturbing) farms that collect their blood. Since vampires drink blood exclusively, it's reasonable to assume that the company that harvests the stuff is a little more important than, say, a beef jerky company. The movie follows Ethan Hawke's character Edward Dalton. Holy crap, he's a vampire named Edward. Oh, those crafty Spierig brothers! We also find out shortly after the movie starts that Edward doesn't like drinking human blood, which suggests that vampires can subsist on animal blood, but that's never fleshed out (no pun intended). Edward is a hemotologist, a scientist whose job involves squeezing every last ounce of blood from the blood farm. His other job is to find a suitable substitute for blood, because the vampires are quickly running out.

Sam Neil's next movie? Vampire dinosaurs.

By random happenstance, Edward has a car accident with what turns out to be a van full of humans. He helps them hide in his car so the police don't find them, and eventually gets tangled up with the human resistance.

He soon meets Willem Dafoe, whose character name isn't as interesting as the name Willem Dafoe. It turns out that Dafoe accidentally cured vampirism (because he himself used it have it) via a technique that boils down to vampires being full-on exposed to sunlight then getting dunked in water. Soon, Edward is ed-cured and tries to bring his cure back to the vampires. Many vampires die, but eventually the characters, now cured of their awful affliction, literally ride off into the sunset.
While the movie might be a transparent allegory about the need for alternative fuels in the developed world, I thought it was quite entertaining despite that fact.

It doesn't paint vampires in a good light, which is refreshing. Furthermore, it turns out that when vampires don't consume blood for several weeks, they begin to turn into awful bat-human creatures that look like the orcs from Lord of the Rings. This was an interesting twist, as it makes the vampires almost relatable (but still monstrous). At one point, the Love Interest Girl actually gives Edward some of her blood simply because she "wants him to stay focused." There's no convoluted love story here; while Edward does travel with Dafoe and Love Interest Girl for most of the movie, never once do they kiss or even touch one another. I was glad to see it, frankly. Not simply because of Twilight's supersaturation in the mainstream today, but because every single movie has a love story. In the case of this movie, there simply wasn't room for one.

Bella doesn't even OWN a crossbow.

Strangely, even though it didn't seem like there was much character development, I think there actually might have been some. Thinking back, I realize that by the end of the movie, I had something of an appreciation for the characters. I wasn't terribly attached to them, but I related to their struggle. After watching the atrocity that is the 1998 remake of Lost in Space, it was kind of nice to care about characters again.

The most interesting thing about the movie was how much thought the Spierig brothers put into the world of vampires. Everything, and I mean everything was considered. Simple things that I wouldn't even think of, like a camera-and-screen inside the car's sun visor. "Duh!" I said, "vampires can't see themselves in mirrors!"

Vehicles have "blackout visors" in every window for when vampires drive in the day, replaced by an array of monitors for each window. You might not be impressed with it, but I thought it was bloody brilliant.

All throughout the movie little ideas crop up that fit perfectly with the vampire theme. Swat teams have these strange welding-helmet-cyclops-masks that block sunlight. There's an underground sidewalk-subway for vampires to walk the city streets during the day! Everything is perfectly crafted to accomodate the vampire's world and it really aids in the suspension of disbelief.

It's hard to really examine the writing of a movie compared to that of a book. You can't see the prose or style in the same ways. It's easier to think of it in terms of how many times I had to stop and think, "wait, that's stupid." In the case of Daybreakers, I didn't ever point out some awful dialogue or nonsensical thing like, "zoom in and enhance." Stylistically the movie's writing succeeded. The characters weren't completely developed, but then again, they were written well enough for the purpose of the movie. This wasn't a J.J. Abrams character picture; this was more like a Twilight Zone. Just a strange set of circumstance and some characters to explore exactly how bizarre everything is. Then again, Twilight Zone usually had really strong characters.

Everybody has crossbows in the future!

Although the movie is rated R mostly for violence and language, I can't help but feel like it might've worked as a PG-13. There were only a few F-words, but they didn't seem necessary; the characters were articulated and intelligent enough to get themselves across without needing to speak that way. After the insane-but-sensical rambling of Norman Osborne, hearing Dafoe swear seemed like an intellectual step down. Then again, I've never seen Boondock Saints, and I'm sure there's more Dafoe F-bombs in there than in Daybreakers.
When it comes to violence, though, I think the Spierig twins decided to please a certain subset of movie-goers, and that happens to be the "gorier the better" crowd. I've seen enough horror movies to know that people actually complain if there's not enough blood and guts. Weirdly, this movie didn't feel very much like a horror movie half the time. It was about Edward trying to redeem himself and humanity.

I should also mention that this movie had some of the sharpest, prettiest lighting I've ever seen in a movie. I'm not typically one to notice such things, but damn.

I guess I've reached the part where people usually give the movie a score or something. I wasn't planning on doing that, but I'll give it a shot.

The good:
Good, logical writing in regard to plot and pacing
Acceptable dialogue
Amazing attention to detail
Fantastic set lighting and general movie "look"

The bad:
Slightly tedious sub-story involving Edward's brother, a sort of human-catcher
Sam Neil's daughter's death (crispy vampire)
It seems kinda like humanity lost anyway, despite the happy ending

Overall: 4/5

All Of It

2011-01-22T21:53:00.000-08:00

Hopefully this is the start of a new type of update I just invented. If I had a story idea (or even just a general thought) that I think is interesting, I'm gonna throw it up here (not to be confused with throw up) for my one remaining reader (myself) to read.

Today's idea comes from my biology textbook. Like all science textbooks I've had, it begins with the basic baby-step kind of information that I've come to expect. After making it through the not-so-subtle jabs at the other branches of science (usually Psychology, the scrawny kid brother of the other sciences), and the ferocious, belligerent sentiments on Creationism, I reached the bit that actually involved some science. A few pages later and it hit me that there's quite a bit of science in the world. This seems obvious, but I found it to be a rather novel idea. I know there's a lot of science because it seems like no matter how many classes one takes on science, biology, anatomy, chemistry, psychology, and the literally jillions of other sub-sub-sub-branches of sciences both big small, real and make-believe, there is always more science to learn. It's like trying to touch every drop of water in the ocean.

"This is it! The final science!"

Here's my idea: What if, one day, someone finished all science. Just think on it for a moment. What would a world look like where everyone knows everything about the natural world? Everything about quantum physics, theories about strings, black holes, worm loops, dilithium crystals and FTL drives?

We've never seen anything like this in movies or television (as far as I know). Even in those Star series (Wars, Trek, Gate and Battle), even the most advanced civilizations seem like they're working toward better technology. Nobody has reached the Third Tier of technology (I'm putting it in Starcraft terms) where there's nothing else to do except build armies and zerg the enemy's base.

Or those silly scientists could stop trying to create a Big
Bang and start building us this amazing bike!

Personally I don't believe it's possible for anyone to know everything there is to know about everything (except, you know, that one Guy). Frankly it would make for a boring existence. Scientists would hold cardboard signs in the street. Research institutes would have to turn into colleges ("gross," thought professor Xavier), and the large Hadron Collider would have to be sold for scrap parts or turned into a really amazing roller coaster.

The point is, the world as we know it wouldn't resemble this Science Complete world even a little. It would be a place of magic-like technology, endless energy supplies, super food and other inventions that heretofore are thought to be impossible.

Like faster-than-light drives or a portal gun. Like from Portal. I know it's bad grammar. I just want my darn portal gun.

Chances are that we humans would be mostly the same, though. To put it in modern terms, the internet is amazing; and we use it to send each other videos of cats farting. We'd probably use the portal gun to deliver food directly to our mouths. We'd be like those unitard-clad fatties from Wall-E.

Did I really just get all of this text from a wandering thought I had while reading about cellular reproduction? Maybe I should read my textbook more often.

Maybe we ALL should read our textbooks, fellow students. That's right, this blog was all a clever ruse to get kids to pay attention in school. Take THAT, Magic School Bus.

I'm Still Here, Chief

2011-01-15T18:42:00.000-08:00

Although there hasn't been an update in a while, don't lose hope! I'm actually taking some of my own writing advice and reading (and writing). In the future, I might put up some of this content for your reading pleasure (or displeasure, if you hate fun).

Photograph unrelated, but still cool.

~William

It Stands For Death & Dismemberment

2010-12-18T13:38:00.000-08:00

Now, I've written a few stories in my time. A few of them even have endings. A few of those actually have decent endings. Something I've never written, however, is a story for a game.

I've always been curious about Dungeons and Dragons, but I've always been turned off by the amount of stat comparisons, difficulty checks, dice rolls and general other nonsense that has to happen in order to have fun. I'm much more interested in the narrative part of the game; it's a video game where almost anything can happen! It's much more of a sandbox than regular games, because you're playing with someone's interpretation of the game rules, not with a computer whose rules are set in stone.

Because of this interest, and because of some new friends who are alright with the idea, I endeavored to create something that I call Dungeons and Dragons Ultra Light, loosely using the naming conventions of fonts, whose weights are measured in degrees from Bold to Ultra Light. That's right, now I'm at least two kinds of geek.

Like the kind of guy who makes a steampunk 20-sided die.

Essentially my game (playfully referred to as D&D Ultra) is the poor man's version of the regular game: There are no game boards, stat sheets, miniatures, and there's only one type of die. The ol' 20-sided, or d20 as it's known to players.

I sketched out some basic rules that made the game play more like an old Lucas Arts adventure game than D&D. It made me realize that the only thing that sets my D&D Ultra apart from, say, Monkey Island or Full Throttle (apart from their games having significantly better writing) is the random dice rolls. In Full Throttle, if you want to open a locked door, you'd click “open” and he'd say, “I need a key for that.” In my game, if you want to open a locked door, I might have you roll the die to pick the lock or use a spell to open it. This is actually what I wanted, because my interest with D&D has always been more with the social interaction than the combat. The dice rolls help keep things interesting.

Rolling dice in this game would only slow down the awesome.

Here's where we get to the portion of the blog that actually talks about writing. When I set out to make a game for my group to play, the first thing I did was search around for a usable pre-made campaign that I could use. Unfortunately the ones I found used a format I wasn't familiar with, and the adventures were far too in depth for some of the people in my group. Although I knew nothing about D&D, let alone writing a campaign, I decided to dive in headfirst and write my own anyway. During one sleepless night, I wrote out the first four areas of the campaign in my head. The next day I sat down and committed my ideas to paper (well, to a word processor) and added enough extra stuff to finish the story. It's very simple, really. As an actual story it wouldn't hold up at all. Frankly I just wanted to make a few interesting areas for my friends to run around in.

Once we actually played it, I learned what I did right and wrong. I previously knew I couldn't anticipate every action the group wanted to take. I naively assumed the group would loosely follow the path I gave them. I had a few interactions and descriptions on paper that I could read off, but 90% of the time I was making things up on the fly, which was immensely fun, but it would have been nice to have something to reference.

For instance, in the first area you have a few people you can talk to: The bartender, the barmaid, an old soldier and a really drunk guy. (It already sounds a little like Monkey Island, huh?) You can talk to all of them, but I had only written responses to one question for each character, and naturally those were the questions nobody asked. I also discovered that my group almost consistently either wanted to flirt with everyone or simply murder them. I was almost prepared; I had written in difficulty rolls for Flirting, Threatening and Bluffing. However, I didn't anticipate the murderous nature of my friends, which in itself is a little frightening.

It turns out that it takes many, many pages of text to be fully prepared for the group's choices. I found a free D&D campaign off the company's website and now I better understand what it says. If you flip to the back there are tons of little paragraphs detailing what happens when a player touches X thing or threatens X person. It's a little bit like programming a video game, except it requires no programming, just a lots writing.

It's a great writing challenge, and yet I find myself wanting to write many, many more adventures.

Nightmare at 20,000 Degrees

2010-12-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

I was recently very ill and I ran a high fiver. Having a fever makes my brain do funny things. I was burning so hot that I let my brothers watch a movie on my computer while I tried to sleep; I knew that I wasn't going to be sleeping anyway; the past has taught me this. Instead I elected to roll over and let my fever burn while I listened to the movie. It wasn't very good; it was about Harrison Ford as a lawyer trying to prove that he didn't murder one of his coworkers. There were no car chases, explosions or anything else interesting. Now, I'm not one to object to courtroom drama (get it? Object? I'm so clever), but this wasn't even the good, Perry Mason kind. However the movie did let my brain interpret the characters and lines into a sort of home-made mashup of itself. It's literally the only way to make the movie interesting.

Once the movie ended and everyone went to bed, I took a hearty dose of Nyquil and twitchingly slipped into some unpleasant non-REM sleep. My brain became stuck in this one awful dream. It's going to be hard to describe because there's nothing like it.

Essentially, I was meeting these people who I think were Italian. However, they didn't speak Italian (or maybe they did), because this language was based around a black, endless supply of cubes arranged almost exactly the way you see below.

Amazingly, Google Image search already had an image of my dream on file.

The only difference between my dream and the picture was that it was like a cube planet made of black cubes. Naturally, the planet was a cube instead of a sphere. I need you to understand how exhaustingly massive it was. Whenever the Fever-Italians would speak, it was like somebody would grab my by my brain stem and yank me down a nonsensical path through the cubes. Each word would take me to a different place on this complicated, black cube. The cube would twist, turn buckle, warp and deform with every new word. I think I was trying to learn the language, but it was simply impossible. The more they talked, the more the city of cubes twisted in seemingly random motion. I couldn't see a pattern to any of it.

It was a tangled nightmare, and it kinda felt the way this looks.

I dreamt this from when I went to sleep around midnight until 6:30 in the morning, when I got up use the bathroom. As I shakily returned and slid into bed, I noticed that my fever had gone down significantly, perhaps completely. The covers were much colder than they had been only moments before. As I pulled my two blankets around myself, I thought, “oh please, not more of that awful Italian language dream.” I was actually terrified that I would have to go back, which I had been subjected to for hours, unable to escape.

It was quite relaxing having an orderly mind.

Fortunately, I didn't have it for the rest of the night. I sat in bed, staring at the ceiling, hoping that I'd be able to go to sleep. Apparently I managed it quite well, because the next time I awoke it was 12:00 in the afternoon. I still felt horrible, though.

English is Crazy

2010-12-03T16:12:00.000-08:00

After an entire semester spent struggling through Spanish, I've come to appreciate my native language much more. Spanish, like English, has its own set of rules to follow. There are exceptions, modifications and just plain weird things about the language that we, as English speakers, don't use. If I were better at Spanish, here's where I would whip out a few direct examples of what I'm thinking of. But I'm not good at Spanish.

Is it offensive that they used shades of brown to denote "Spanishness?"

As I learned the broad strokes of Spanish, it made me start to question English's oddities. Like, why do we say, “way to go?” What does that phrase even mean? I see the word “way,” which means a style or method, but I just get confused when it's placed with “to go.” Are we saying that someone did something just the right way? Perhaps it's a reduction of “that's the right way to go,” suggesting that someone did something good. Who's the guy who decided to reduce this phrase into a meaningless hunk of words, huh!?

I can't prove it, but I suspect this book had a lot to do with it.

Here are some more phrases that could very well confuse and infuriate someone who is trying to become more proficient with the language:
Break a leg
Keep your eyes peeled
Look sharp
By and large
The apple of my eye

What is up with our English? And lets not forget words with bizarre alternate meanings that relate to things that seem completely arbitrary.
Cold (Refers to low temperature OR viral infection)
My mother kept telling me that if I didn't wear a coat out in the cold, I'd catch a cold.
Rose (A type of flower OR “to go up”)
The rose rose from its humble beginnings in the dirt.
Brood (To ponder moodily OR “offspring”)
Charlie's brood were known to brood.
Blubber (Mammalian fat OR “to utter while sobbing”)
Teresa usually began to blubber when the subject of whale blubber came up.
Tender (Sore OR gentleness OR “to present for acceptance”)
Bill tenderly tendered his resignation, which was difficult because his arm was still tender.
Count (A European nobleman OR “to recite numbers”) (Sesame Street has known about this for years.)
The Count would count the tiles on his ceiling when he couldn't sleep.
Season (A specific annual time division and “enhance the flavor of food")
During the winter season, Mark noticed that Sarah would season her cooking more heavily.
Coast (Seashore OR “move aimlessly”)
While riding my bicycle, I coast down the hill by the coast.
Polish (To make something shiny by cleaning OR someone or something from Poland)
My Mom made us polish the Polish furniture.

Oh well, since it's the only language I have, I guess I'll just have to keep using it.

Style Stuck

2010-11-08T19:44:00.000-08:00

Here's an entry that's as much for me as anybody else.

If you've been writing a while, you probably have a style you like to write in. Whether that be an emulation of romance novels (“Her eyes burned with passion”) or you exclusively write nonfiction (“The American Civil War was a time when...”), you'll find that you've settled into a style that's comfortable for you. Even if you try to break away from it, it's going to creep back into your work, like how your slouch creeps in while you're trying to stand up straight for a prolonged period of time.

...Which is really difficult for some people.

I noticed that I was style stuck when, of all things, I was watching Cinemassacre's video detailing his trip to Sleepy Hollow, NY. He begins by reading a passage from the actual Sleepy Hollow book, which was one of the most beautifully written things I've recently heard. The particular passage reads,

“Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of the land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail of tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquility.”

I already know that some of my readers will be all too happy to tell me about all kinds of books with beautiful writing, and if they do so, I encourage them to hunt for it in Google Books and mention some page numbers.

Now, this isn't something that I can just analyze and explain why it's pretty. It's like describing a painting; the most I can do is list some subjective reasons I had for liking it. In lieu of a detailed explanation, here are some things that jump out at me.

Washington Irving was going to great lengths to describe what he thought of as an idyllic place, and so he uses language that reflects the relaxation he (probably) felt when he was there. He uses somewhat uncommon words for things, like saying a brook “glides” through the valley, and that it “murmurs.” If I had been trying to write something like that, my subtlety would have been much more hammer-like.

“A river flows through the valley. The soft sound of rushing water is all you can hear over the woodpeckers.”

It doesn't sound relaxing at all! Of course this is a tongue-in-cheek example of my own writing, because I'm sure I could write something relaxing if I really tried, but Washington Irving makes the whole paragraph feel effortless, as if he wrote it in one dip of his pen with a single, flowing movement of his hand. He didn't even have to think about why he loves Sleepy Hollow.

"I had you fooled. I really hated it there. I'm just that good."

How can I use this to improve my writing? I'll stick with my usual advice and say, it helps writers (especially me) to read as many books as possible, by as wide a variety of authors as possible, as much as possible. I haven't read anything in a while, which might explain this whole “no blog” situation I've been stuck in. As always, it also helps if you like what you're writing about. It's even better if you love it.

I'm No Superman (Thank Goodness)

2010-10-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

So you've finally gotten out of the habit of inserting yourself into your stories. You've moved forward as a writer. However, your characters still feel a little flat. This could be due to several factors, but the one I'm addressing today is Superman.

Here we see what it would look like if Perry Mason threw on the costume.

Don't get confused and think that I'm saying that Superman is a boring or shallow character. On the contrary, he's pretty interesting (but not as much as Batman). I'm just using him as an example of a character-type. To avoid confusion, I'll refer to this type of character as the Invincible.
Now, lets define what I think of as the Invincible in terms of his traits and actions.
• He doesn't have any weaknesses. Nothing can defeat or harm him in any way. The Invincible doesn't even have that debilitating emotional weakness (i.e. a girlfriend) to be used against him, unlike a certain Clark Kent.
• He's already the best at what he does, and he does everything. Not only that, he does it perfectly on the first try, and without even practicing beforehand.
• He knows he's the Invincible, and so he doesn't have to fear anyone or anything.
• He actually shows the other characters just how weak they are by simply going about his day.
Every character needs a weakness. Even Superman, in all of his almost godlike power, has that one weakness.

Without that weakness, the comics, nay, the series would end on the first page. “Superman crashed on Earth, rose to power and fought petty criminals forever and ever and ever. Nobody could stop him. The End.” I suppose he could also end up like Doctor Manhattan from the Watchmen. I'm not recommending that you see the movie, (actually I recommend staying as far away from it as possible,) but essentially Dr. Manhattan is Superman without any weaknesses. In fact, he's so powerful that he is incredibly depressed and detached from the world because there isn't a thing in the universe he can't do. He's too powerful for his own good. It's depressing (just like that whole stupid movie).
Strengths and weaknesses define characters. It's very difficult to have a character without both. If they have only strengths, they're Dr. Manhattan; if they're all weakness, they're Woody Allen. Both extremes have their own sets of problems, so let me explain by using a good middle-road character. Lets take Neville Longbottom from Harry Potter. The kid is a mess. He's neurotic and he never wins at anything. For most of the series, he's a quivering bundle of nerves. He's used for both comedy and tragedy, but as a character he's about 90% weakness. As the series goes on, we see Neville actually getting a little bolder and doing a little better. By book five, we find that with a little encouragement, this heretofore pathetic character is actually quite good at defense against the Dark Arts. His continuing rise to bravery is one of the best parts of the whole series. If Neville had been a tanned, buff Invincible at the start of the series, he'd be the worst part of it. We'd think, “of course Neville could win at Quidditch. He never loses.” Offhand, I admit that I can't remember if Neville ever actually played Quidditch. Someone comment and tell me if he did.

And while you're at it, tell me how this happened.

What makes the Invincible so detrimental to a story is the fact that he doesn't seem to grow as a character, and that makes him boring. Growth is everything. Readers (and watchers of television and movies) expect to see a character, and usually their relationships go from point A to B to Z by the end of the program. If the character is the same at the end of the story as he was at the beginning, he seems flat. This is one of the reasons people didn't like Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, because Alice stays basically the same throughout, except for the very end where she tells that ugly suitor where to stick it. It was a pretty minor journey. I'd say it was a point A to B progression because she didn't go very far.
Look at Lord of the Rings: The characters at the end of the story are quite different from how they began it. It's point A to Z, easily, or perhaps point A to something that comes after Z. Think of how boring it would have been if Aragorn could have single-handedly taken on all of the armies of Mordor!
Another example of an interesting character progression is Guy Montag from Fahrenheit 451. In the beginning of the book, Guy is actually one of the bad guys, or at least he's working for them. He even enjoys burning books. By the end of the book, Guy's opinion on almost everything is changed. A to Z again!
The reason audiences want to see a flawed character succeed is because flawed people are what people can relate to. Having a perfect character isn't relatable and it isn't interesting. Don't do it. In fact, you have my recommendation to screw up your character as much as possible, as long as you promise to fix them up (a little) by the end.

Your Lazy Brain

2010-09-25T19:54:00.000-07:00

Your brain has its own nefarious purposes. It likes to waste time doing dumb things. I should know; mine spent all weekend in front of the computer managing nothing but the muscles it takes to kill Germany in Civilization.

For most people, their brain is attached to them; they don't seem to leave home without it. This is unfortunate because most people's brains don't have that person's best interests at heart. No, these crafty brains settle into a comfortable non-thinking state that keeps the population from doing several things, one of which is critical thinking.

Now, if you're anything like me, you're outraged by your brain's enslavement of your body. “I'm not going to stand for this,” you might be saying. Don't say it too loud: Brains hear everything.

“But William!” you begin, “how will I ever escape the tyranny of my own lazy brain?”

Fortunately there are many things you can do to keep your brain under your thumb (metaphorically). You see, brains aren't nefarious by themselves; they're kind of like dogs; they're really quite friendly as long as you feed them, but as soon as they start starving, BAM! You're eaten. The problem these days is that people have gotten into the habit of not feeding their brains (and in some cases their bodies too.) You see, while America has continued to get fatter and more rotten (myself included), their brains have followed that exact diet (myself included again).

Fortunately, because you and I are both writers, our brains are already miles ahead! You've always known you were more cunning and sly than everyone else, and that's exactly why. But lets not rest on our laurels!

If you're starting to wonder if I'm ever going to get to the writing tip, you're almost in luck. You see, there are several things writers can do to keep their brains full and happy (but nevertheless ungrateful): Writing (of course.) But not just any old writing.

In fact, some writing might actually make your brain unhealthy after writing it.

Particularly I find that finding new and exciting ways to approach a story, or ways to combine things into one, are quite fun. New words are fun to make up. Although I'll probably never use them, I find myself specifically identifying interesting words or even phrases as names or titles for some yet-uncreated character for a future story. For instance, when I was waiting (and waiting and waiting) for my car to get smogged, I got to watch a documentary on the Blue Angels (looped literally three times). I learned that there is such a job as Flight Surgeon for these Angels, and even more interesting, it has nothing to do with medicine. This got me thinking, “what other conventional words could be used in unconventional titles?” I came up with a few like Water Conductor and Thought Soldier. My brains likes me when I do these things, mostly because it's less of a brain exercise and more of an imagination lap (in the sense of physical exercise), and I've already written a blog about this.

Now, people would have you believe that the best way to keep your brain active is to do daily arithmetic and reading. While some of these people have this thing called science on their side, I like to think that there are ways to stretch your mind without having to invest in a Nintendo DS or have an education.

What I'm getting at is critical thinking. My favorite way to improve my critical thinking is by reading really horrible stories. Where can you find such stories? Everywhere, including Hollywood. Even terrible movies and television shows can help you start thinking about the who and why of a character or situation. This kind of critique has become uncommon in the minds of most people, which is why so many people's opinions usually boil down to “liked it” or “hated it.” It's not that they're dumb, it's just that they're out of the habit of really thinking about why things are good (or terrible).

Yes it's terrible, but why, exactly?

To really improve, you need to learn how to take a story apart and examine its parts. Just like how a good mechanic would know how to take apart a faulty engine to find and fix the problem, a writer should know how to examine the parts of a story that have fallen flat, or sometimes more importantly, where the story succeeded. This is why there are some stories that were good overall, but upon rereading it, you discover lots of nagging little things that diminish the story. Or conversely, a story which has excellent parts but is overall quite poor.

Here's where I'd like to say, “I once wrote terrible stories, but once I learned what to avoid, I never wrote a bad thing again!” But I'd be lying. Every writer occasionally writes something that turns out weak; even the highly-paid professionals. The key to good writing isn't learning to never make mistakes, but learning how to recognize and repair mistakes once you've made them.

More Like a Brain Hurricane

2010-09-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

Every story has to start somewhere. Maybe you've had the idea for your story all your life. Maybe you've lived long enough to see your idea thought up by someone else and put into a Hollywood motion picture.

But lets say you're sitting at the computer (or writing desk, if you're old fashioned) staring at a blank screen (or paper). You've got nothing in your head that can make a good story (or in my case, a good blog) and you're frustrated.

Fortunately for me, I like to plan ahead. Whenever I have an idea that I think might be worth writing about, I find the nearest scrap of paper and scrawl it down. I also have a more permanent method of idea storage in a word document on my computer. The ideas can be as vague as a phrase like, “you are truly a painter with words,” or something

as intricate as a two-page breakdown detailing the seven different ways the world might end, and why, and how this would change things. If you don't have a magical word document of ideas for yourself, I suggest you start one immediately. If you don't have a computer, I recommend getting one of those cheap black and white notebooks from the dollar store and keeping it somewhere secret; somewhere safe.

Coming up with story ideas is always fun, even if all you have to work with is something basic like a phrase. For this next example, I want you read each phrase and briefly imagine a few vague story ideas relating them. Don't read them all at once or your imagination won't be able to keep up. Pay attention to the capitalization: Does it make it a proper name? A title? A business? A location?

One-Way Mirror
Watercloset
The man who cheated at everything
Globeswarm
Puckerscrunch
Misspelt
Miss Pelt
Fanatica
The Carnival Canal
Lucky starts

If your imagination is functioning with any kind of efficiency, hopefully it was able to picture a few things that you weren't thinking about before reading this blog.

Don't feel discouraged if you can't come up with any interesting-sounding words or phrases on your own. In fact, it means you'll have to use a different means of coming up with stories: What If.
Yes, I'm taking this idea from Steven King, but it's a pretty good method.

"You stole my method? That'll be $5,000, please."

Essentially, any basic idea for a story can be broken down to a What If question.

What if your Dad was with the bad guys?
What if you could climb into your own dreams?
What if reality was just part of a computer construct?

If you were paying attention, you'll notice that I just gave the basic ideas for Star Wars, Inception and the Matrix. Of course, there's more to those movies than those basic ideas, but you can understand (perhaps) where the ideas began.

Interestingly, you can do the same backward trace with crappy movies to see how uncreative the people behind it were.

What if two stoner guys can't find their car? (Dude Where's My Car)
What if some teenagers have a bunch of sex? (A whole bunch of movies, but I'm thinking American Pie)

And boy, people can usually tell if the movie is gonna be garbage (see above) or something good. Even movies like SAW (which I haven't seen, but I kinda feel like I have), are at least a little more original than their slashy-violent counterparts.
What if a crazy murderer kills a bunch of people? (Friday the 13th, Nightmare of Elm Street, Scream)
What if a murderer traps people in situations where they either have to maim themselves, maim/kill someone else, or die? (SAWs I, II, III, IV and V.)

Now that you understand how you can trace a big, finished idea back to its root, you should also be able to see how you can begin an idea with the same kind of seed.

Ideas can come from anywhere. For instance, to enable cheats in Grand Theft Auto 4, you have to dial specific phone numbers on your cell phone. After you do, cars, motorcycles, boats, or helicopters literally appear in front of you, even if the appearance is detrimental to the traffic you're standing in. I thought, "What if someone really could dial a special phone number and get anything he wants?"

Essentially he's cheating on his own life. When you cheat in the game (depending on the cheat,) it will limit your ability to earn certain achievements, and it lists you as a “cheater” in the menus. Mild drawbacks to be sure, but they're enough to make sure you never save your game after cheating. Since there are drawbacks to cheating, there would have to be some kind of penalty in the story, too. At this point, I break down further question-options and list any similarities to something that already exists in pop culture, or further details that interest me.

What if he goes blind after 100 “cheats?” It means he'd be very sparing with his cheats, if he used them at all. (Or he'd just stop on cheat #99.)
What if someone dies whenever he cheats? (Seems kinda like the movie The Box)
What if the things he gets from cheating just vanish after a certain amount of time like Leprechaun gold? Imagine having your helicopter vanish into thin air while you're a mile in the air!

I had another What If idea after watching huge amounts of Star Trek; I've always thought that the transporters in the show seemed problematic. Sure, in the future anything's possible, but I'm not certain that they're safe.

What if whenever someone used the transporter, they died? Their atoms reconstruct on the other side, but the person as we knew them is dead. The person on the other side is such an exact clone that they don't even realize they died, at least not until they try to go through again. There would be no way to test this kind of thing. Everyone enlisted in Starfleet could have been killed long ago, replaced by unwitting clones of themselves, sans souls.

"This planet is so nice, I could have died and gone to heaven!"

Now, I'm not too anxious to write any kind of Star Trek fan fiction, but I thought the idea was interesting, and now I can't stop thinking about it whenever I watch someone get beamed up.

Now that you'd gotten to spend a few minutes with me during my creative process, hopefully you'll be more creative.

(Please don't sue me, Mr. King!)

Guest Writing and Romance

2010-09-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

Due to a combination of factors, I've failed to make time to update. However, my amazing sister (sometimes known as Netraptor) has kindly volunteered to write something for today. She is addressing an issue that I've yet to mention: Romance.

Thank you, Kess!

• • •
One genre that young writers tend to try writing, and usually suck at, is romance.
Every movie and book and story these days has some kind of romance in it, whether it's boy meets girl or girl falls for vampire. Swashbuckling movies like Pirates of the Caribbean or Lord of the Rings had romantic entanglements among the characters.
But new writers sit down with their posse of new characters, and eventually, couples will form. This can be a little troubling if you've never been in an actual romantic relationship and have no idea what it's like. And yet you've set up two characters to fall for each other. You need to write it. How do you go about it?

It's not as hard as you think. Just take a good hard look at your characters' personalities. If your characters are as developed as they should be by this point, they will have quirky personalities. Is the guy shy and introverted? Is the girl a social butterfly? If they are friends, just start constructing scenarios.
And make them funny. Real-life romance is fraught with peril and pain, and yet is hugely entertaining for onlookers. The guy embarrasses himself trying to ask her on a date. She misinterprets what he's asking and thinks he's mad at her. He locks himself in his room in anguish, and she can't understand why he's acting so weird.
Keep your characters in character, and think through all the awkward, silly things they might do as they get interested in each other. It helps if they have known each other for a while, or been friends, because you have an established relationship to work with.

I'll say it again: keep your characters in character. Young writers tend to hiccup on the characterization when it comes to romance. Their characters' personalities disappear and they become the writer just acting out whatever they want to happen.

Like George Lucas did that one time.

But your characters are not necessarily you. They are different people. They don't think the same way you do or react the same way. If you have already spent story space establishing this, don't throw all that away! Sit down and figure out how they would react to things given their personality, not yours.

The first romance I ever tried to write was a problem-fractured relationship between two characters who liked each other, but fought constantly.

At that time I had never been in a romantic relationship, but I studied them in books. Particularly the relationship between the main characters in the first couple of Mitford books by Jan Karon. Their romance was so very real. No fluff, no nonsense, just the clash of personalities and loads of misunderstandings, often with painful or hilarious results. I made careful note of how it was written, then set out to write the courtship of my two characters.

I still think fondly of those two characters and the nightmare I put them through. Awful stuff to live, but wonderfully entertaining to read, everything from near-death experiences to way too many engagement rings.

But you don't have to hook up all your characters. If you are writing a one-shot story, it's enough to have them be friends, and imply at the end that they will probably get married later on.

Examples of good relationships and bad relationships are all around us. Everybody has friends who are dating, or breaking up, or some stage between the two. If you have had dating experiences, plug some of that emotion into your characters. Let your characters act real, because when you write honestly, your reader will know. And they will identify with your characters.

As soon as you have a reader empathizing with your characters, you have them hooked.

The 3D People and Their Magical 2D World

2010-09-02T20:37:00.000-07:00

If you're half as nerdy as me, you might have tried to write stories that take place inside your favorite video games. If you're really nerdy then the games in question are probably really obscure, and if that's the case then this probably isn't the blog for you.

I'm not talking about old video games like Pitfall or Pac Man (cough), but rather more recent games (circa 1990 at least). At first glance, a video game with a good story or good universe can be quite appealing to write about. If you remember games like Decent, Commander Keen, King's Quest, Space Quest and Cosmic Cosmo, then you're old enough to appreciate the tender deliciousness of games that helped stimulate the imagination of my childish mind.

Ur, childish because I was a child when those games came out. Literally childish.

You have to remember that most of those old games didn't have much in the way of story except maybe a screen or two of poorly-written narrative set in some grainy 16-bit font.

Even if I could have read the story, which I couldn't, I would have found a rather thin excuse to have the player collect the Red Key Card or kill snails or defeat Mordak. Well, King's Quest actually had a pretty good story. There was actually a pretty good reason to defeat Mordak.

Ahem.

As a young player of these games, I was interested in making the characters from the games have additional adventures. I wasn't trying to make an expanded universe or add impressive self-inserts of myself; I guess I just wanted new levels. I could kind of reach that goal via writing. It always turned out awful, but thad whad Id ecpect frm a chlid hoo culdn't spelle very well.

Fast forward to Christmas 2004 when my family finally got DSL and I got a new game for Christmas called World of Warcraft. You know where this is going.

Long story short, I played the heck out of the game, and eventually tried my hand at writing inside the universe. It's not the worst thing in the world; I'm definitely not the first person to try this kind of thing. After all, Warcraft has enough story to fill several hundred books and enough fans to fill a convention center.

Like at Blizzcon.

For anyone who has tried to write a story inside the universe created by a video game, there are a few things to know:

The designers make gameplay decisions based on how fun they are, not on how accurate they are to real life.
The world is sized to make it fast to walk from place to place, not to make it as big as a real planet.
Everything is streamlined.

For a person trying to write a story inside the game, they're going to encounter these weird hurdles in their storytelling process. If I were just starting out writing a story, lets say it's in Warcraft and I set it in Stormwind, I'm not picturing a real city when I write; I'm picturing the city from the game, which is laughably small compared to a real city. There's no infrastructure. There's no economy; heck, there aren't even people living there.

Now let me just clarify: I don't want people saying, “you just like getting bogged down in the minute details of stupid crap like this, William! It's not relevant to the story!”

I'm not trying to say that you're supposed to add all of the boring things that I've just mentioned, but when you're picturing Stormwind, again, you're picturing the one in the game. If you want to write a more authentic story, you have to imagine a real medieval city, though one that contains magic and stuff. Lets make an illustration.

Lets say that I'm writing a story that's taking place inside a universe that I'm making up. It's completely my own. When I tell you that there's a huge city in the story called Whirlgate, the capital of the Highland nation of Men. It's built on top of a mountain and its buildings scatter down the cliffs, which have been quarried. As they descend the mountain, the buildings become smaller and smaller; the downtown area near the top gives way to residential hovels made of white stone toward the bottom. To keep the wind down, there is a massive twenty foot wall surrounding the entire city. It zigzags up and down the cliff in a strange, random-looking layout.

If your imagination is working properly (and if my writing isn't garbage), then hopefully you pictured something that might exist in the real world. Maybe it looked a little bit like something from Lord of the Rings, but still, it was real. When I say Stormwind you're going to be picturing that location in the game. Static. Polygonal. Video game. This is why I always prefer to make something up from scratch instead of fanficking myself into the corner.

To complicate matters, if your audience is also familiar with the game, they're going to picture the video game version of the city, no matter how flowery and descriptive your language is. This kind of thing happened to me when I read Howl's Moving Castle after seeing the animated feature; I couldn't NOT see the characters as Japanese animation in my head.

Though the movie is still fantastic.

I guess the point of all this is that I don't recommend writing stories inside games. I'm not saying to never do it; you might find you're quite good at it and that I'm full of hot air. If anything, it'll be a helpful learning experience that you can put toward your further writing successes.

(Also, since I didn't have anything Wednesday, I'm posting Friday's blog a few hours early as a sort of "please forgive me" bonus!)

Alliteration

2010-08-30T00:00:00.000-07:00

No lesson today, just a reposting of something I've written before!

Seldom surrendering to sumptuous sensory sensations such as smell and sight, the seven sirens sailed southward, seeking to serve as the sheik's assistants. Subsequently, the sirens were seen by a sailor who succeeded in seizing their ship. He slaughtered the sirens and sold the ship's scraps for sixty-seven strips of silver, which he swiftly spent to secure a stable for his stallion, Stanley.

Stanley and the sailor spent their Saturdays stealing sugar from the supermarket. Sadly, they were seen by a security guard and a sailor who was on shore leave. Subsequently, the sailor was sentenced to several psychological sessions with a psychiatrist.

She said, “sir, surely you've seen the seriousness of your situation,”

“You shouldn't see me as a statistic,” said the incarcerated sailor, sighing. The psychiatrist shifted in her seat.

“Still,” she said, skimming her schedule, “it's simpler if we shoot Stanley.”

In the stables, Stanley the stallion shot shifty glances toward the street. It seemed simple, escaping, but such an exercise struck him as stupid.

“Screw it,” he said, starting to stampede. He shattered the stockade and sprinted into the street, striking several pedestrians.

Startled, Sarah Sitwell, senior assistant software supervisor, spilled cinnamon spiced coffee on her shirt, softly scalding her supple skin.

“Shoot,” she shouted, shaking herself and scanning the surrounding shunpike to see if anyone had seen her. It seemed she was safe. After a few short seconds, security soldiers arrived and shot Stanley until his body surrendered his spirit, which swerved off into the stratosphere.

“How sad,” said Sarah, slinging her shoulder bag over herself. She stalked into the sunset, sullen.

Some of you might have seen this before on my other, forgotten livejournal, but I thought it was funny, and I didn't have anything for Monday!

Modus Ponens

2010-08-27T00:00:00.000-07:00

Oh, school; messing up my blog 'skedge, making me get up early. On the bright side, it gives me the option of posting something I've written in the past, and my writing folder is chock flippin' full of things that would otherwise never be seen by another pair of human eyes. I'll tell you what this was gonna be about at the end of this post.

Roger Einhaus parted the blinds and looked down the street. There weren't any signs of life in the neighborhood, nor had there been for several days. The postage stamp-sized front lawns of the houses were unkept and overgrown. Some of the houses still had automated sprinklers that came on in the morning or evening, but most of the others had been turned off weeks before. In fact, there were only two lawns that were green, the rest were prickly shades of brown. Roger had never been in an abandoned neighborhood like this. There weren't even any cars passing through. The last one he'd seen had gone down the street about a week before; a black SUV, clearly loaded with a family's earthly possessions. Even though it had only been visible for a few seconds, Roger had been able to see blankets, clothes, luggage, a computer, a television and at least three children stuffed into the back of the SUV, pressed uncomfortably against the windows. There was even more luggage and half a dozen shipping boxes strapped to the top of the car with cotton rope. The family didn't see Roger inside his fortress, sitting in a darkened room with the blinds drawn. There wasn't a hint that anybody lived there except for the slightly parted blinds from which Roger peered.
It was times like these that he wished for a dog. At least he could have someone to ease the tension that he felt. At the very least it might keep his mind off the news reports, which Roger just couldn't bring himself to turn off. Every hour seemed to bring more alarming reports of outbreaks in major cities. The news anchor's nonchalance had long left him; the smug smile and calm expression had been replaced with those of alarm and rigidity. Even his usually calming tone had started to crack, either from worry or dehydration. That reminded Roger that he needed to be drinking water.
He let the blinds fall back into place with a metallic click and stepped into the kitchen. There was a glass on the counter that Roger had been using for the past few days. It probably wasn't very sanitary, and now was no time to be letting germs roam free. He washed the glass in the sink, scrubbed a little dish soap into it, washed it out and set it down. He stared down into the sink for a long while. He thought a little bit about a lot of things. He didn't have enough food to last more than two weeks. At that thought, he looked up at his cupboards. There was enough canned food bulging over the edges that a casual observer might think Roger was crazy, like those people who were so worried about Y2K.
He was probably going to contract that new flu that was going around, anyway. That was all he needed; first a death sentence cancer diagnosis, then the weaponized flu. He filled the glass and took a deep drink. His throat was dry and the water didn't make it feel any better. He felt feverous. It was probably just cabin fever; he hadn't set foot outside for the better part of a month, and spending that time in a cramped apartment filled with dread and fear. Maybe it was time to raid someone's house. He was frightened as he realized he had been thinking about it for days. It wasn't that he was hurting for supplies, but it never hurt to be prepared. Just like the Boy Scouts, Roger thought. He knew that most families probably would have taken as much of their canned goods as they could carry, but the more perishable food was probably left behind. That's what he was counting on.
Reluctantly, he stepped over to the blinds and looked out again. It seemed like all he did was stare out at the dead neighborhood. He let the blinds fall closed again. He pulled open a kitchen drawer and removed earplugs and an old dust mask that had once been used to hunt for moldy insulation in his landlord's attic. It was odd, now that he thought of it, to have a tenant repair something for the landlord. He tisted the earplugs in his fingers and inserted them into his ears, then he shook the dust out of the mask and pressed it to his face. He reluctantly stepped over to the front door and fastened the straps behind his head. With ceremonial slowness, he unlocked the door. It was a moment before he could pull it open. He took a deep breath.
The door stuck a little as he pulled it open, letting in a dusty breeze that was hotter than the inside of his apartment. All he could smell was his own breath inside the mask. He wondered if the flu could get into a person through their eyes.
He turned and looked down the street. Some people had left their cars in their driveways, probably the families who owned multiple cars. He had seen people syphoning the gas from one car and putting it into the other. Luckily the rioting that had apparently happened in some other neighborhoods hadn't been a problem here; although almost everyone was in a panic, people hadn't resorted to breaking windows. Everyone had left in a fairly orderly fashion. The amount of noise the night everyone left had been outrageous. From the hours of eight O'clock to around three AM people had packed their families and possessions and hit the highway in hopes of finding safety with relatives that lived out of state. Either that or the nearest military base, but Roger already knew that the military wasn't going to help anyone.
He crossed the street toward the Richardson house. They had been good people, the Richardsons. Unfortunately they had locked their front door. Maybe they believed they were coming back. Roger searched around for that obvious rock that usually held a hide-a-key. People just didn't seem to realize that the hide-a-key had never been a secret, since everybody seemed to have one. There was a rock in the flowerbed that didn't remotely look like it belonged. Roger lifted the rock and found that the Richardsons had taken the key with them. Who the hell would have the presence of mind to remember that kind of thing? Most people were too scared to even speak coherently, let alone collect all of their spare house keys. He decided to try the next house.
It was peaceful, walking in a neighborhood with nobody around. It was like being on a movie set, or a model neighborhood. Lots of doll houses that were never meant to be lived in. However, it was hard to be relaxed when the sky was that awful orange-brown shade. Why was there so much dirt in the air? It was like someone was dropping dirt from the clouds. The evening sun was a deadened point of orange brightness in the swirling atmosphere. It might have been Roger's imagination but it seemed like the dirt made everything a lot quieter. Then again, there weren't any people around to make noise anyway.
The neighbors hadn't locked their door. Roger felt a little ashamed as he entered the house. He didn't remember the name of the family who lived here. He closed the door behind him softly. He didn't like the idea of someone coming in behind him.
“I know nobody's around,” said Roger, “I just don't want to take the chance if I'm wrong.” He spoke aloud. His voice was a little jarring. He realized it had been a while since he had spoken at all. The only human voice he heard anymore was that of the news anchorman. He fervently hoped the house was empty.
There was a little coat rack in the foyer. A single jacket remained, a small pink one that probably belonged to a little girl. Why wouldn't they take that with them?
Roger crossed the living room, which looked like a tornado had swept through. He entered the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was a mess. It looked like they had just raked everything out of the pantry without paying much attention. The refrigerator was swinging open. Various food items were strewn on the floor. Not only had these people left in a hurry, it was clear they weren't planning a return trip.
There wasn't much left in the refrigerator except some leftover Chinese food that smelled like it had gone bad long before the family had left, and a box of baking soda that had probably come free when they had bought the house. Roger sighed into his mask. He decided to check the rest of the house, maybe he could get a hold of some blankets or something.
The back wall of the house was one solid window running from floor to ceiling. It wasn't the kind of thing a contractor would put in standard; the people must have put it in themselves. Roger glanced out the window. It was a shame the backyard was so pathetic-looking. It didn't look like the grass had ever been taken care of. He noticed a dog lying dead in the middle of the lawn. He looked away.
After ten minutes of scouring the house, Roger left with a garbage bag containing a few boxes of powdered milk and some sheets from the master bed. He felt guilty for stealing, but part of him rationalized that he would be needing it more than anyone else in the neighborhood. He stuffed as much as he could into a kitchen garbage bag and slung it over his shoulder. After leaving the loot back at his house, he went to another home.

This was the early stages of (one of the) zombie stories I was trying to write about a year ago (2009ish). I thought it might be interesting to have a crotchety old man with cancer as one of the only people on earth who is immune to the Zombie-flu. He shares more than a passing similarity to a certain teacher I had once. I had another, earlier part of the story that gets into his backstory a little more, but I figured that the audience had already figured out that he was a jerk.

What I learned from this:

1) I don't like writing jerk characters.

2) I don't like writing post-apoc stories as much as I like playing them in games or watching them in movies.

3) Some stories will never be finished, and that's probably a good thing.

Ending the World (Guest-Written by a Supervillain)

2010-08-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

Oh my, just writing the title down makes me excited.

There are many, many different ways the world could end. Because we're more creative than the average person, we supervillains also happen to be a great deal more deranged. This means that we're quite good when it's time to come up with creative and exciting ways to make the world go kablooey. To list only a few, the world could end via:

Explosion

Magic

Black hole

Magic explosion

Aliens

Karma

Pollution

War

Planetary collision

Any number of problems relating to the Sun

Not enough pollution

Anarchy

Disease

Weather

Zombies

Vampires

Curses

Ancient artifacts (see above)

Bad luck

Underground creatures

Aboveground creatures

Gods (angry, happy, lazy, etc.)

Angels

Demons

Superheroes

...I hate that last one.

As you can see, there is no shortage of ways to dispose of a planet and all of its annoying inhabitants. It doesn't even have to be hard. During the creative process, writers and supervillains alike can plan on either starting or finishing the story with such an event. It could be like that movie 2012 where things blow up all throughout the movie, or like The Day After Tomorrow where everything happens toward the beginning and just kind of ramps up. It could also be like Ladder 49 where the firefighter dies at the end. Oh no, did I spoil that for you?

I'm so painfully wicked.

Technically I don't think that killing off a firefighter (portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix no less) counts as an evil plan. It doesn't take a mastermind to see that killing off one character is small beans compared to the main course of the evening, and that is cracking a planet in half, or in thirds, or other wonderfully evil fractions.

Sometimes it's not even the “event” that you're trying to write about. Some movies and books actually take place a long time after the world has ended. As you might imagine, it's referred to as post-apocalyptic, which is kind of a misnomer because the actual apocalypse from the Bible is kind of a one-off. Nobody walks away from that one.

Delicious.

I guess it's not really a (capital) Apocalypse you want; it's more like an unpocalypse. Or an apocalypse lite. Like the beer. I mean, what's the point of killing everyone if there's nobody around to notice? Sure, the reveling by the person who pulled it off would be wonderful for a while, but without civilians to look sadly toward the burned-out husks of buildings, what's the point?

That's not to say I wouldn't mind a good reveling.

The real trick is leaving enough main characters alive long enough to give the audience a (false) hope that he'll give this miserable story a redeeming ending. You would think that after the freaking apocalypse the guy's story would end, but it never seems to. If you're too cowardly to actually blow up your universe, I suppose you could just threaten to do it a bunch of times throughout the main character's journey. He'll probably try to stop it, and he'll probably win, but at least you kept the tension on him.

Still, when it's time to make like The Matrix and make the world an awful place to live, you might as well do it right. That's actually a good example of what a story can look like when the bad guys kind of win. As long as you ignore the second and third movies and all of that strange Matrix Online story stuff they threw (up) into the lore.

Gross.

Someone should really try writing more stories from the perspective of the quote unquote bad guys. That's right, even though I'm writing, I still used air quotes as if I were actually talking. Into your brain.

Muahahaaaaa.

Signed,

The Supervillain

Please Do Not Plagiarize

2010-08-23T00:00:00.000-07:00

I don't think anybody living today can say they've never accidentally plagiarized something, whether it was on purpose or by accident. We Americans live in a culture that seems to revel in stealing the work of others and either turning it into a joke or a competing product.

Lets say you've just finished reading something that really got your imagination flowing, like Steph Meyers' The Host. When I read it, I became very interested in alien invasion stories. To be clear, I don't mean I started researching alien abductions and close encounters; I simply enjoyed the idea of aliens coming to earth for some mysterious purpose. This was the basic idea behind many episodes of the original Twilight Zone in one form or another, and sometimes the aliens turned out to be us.

After reading The Host, I didn't start trying to write a better alien invasion/romance story. I don't want to copy anything, especially not something filled with romantic mush. Instead I started trying to think of new spins on the idea.

What if the aliens are actually ancient Earthlings returning to Earth to capture a relative who has no idea his ancestors flew off in a saucer?

What if aliens land and do nothing but lie about everything? Though they already did this in a Dr. Who. SPOILERS: The alien invasion is just a cover while the real aliens subvert all of the governments of the world. END SPOILERS.

If you read enough sci-fi short stories, inevitably you're going to read something about one kind of alien invasion or another. Star Trek has done it many times, Isaac Asimov has done it more. In one episode of The Next Generation, they even had the humans dress up like aliens and move around among the aliens. Why would they do this?

To make sure it's safe for the rest of them.

I was gonna have a clip from Signs up there where that army general says that line ominously, but it seems nobody has put it on YouTube. But imagine how cool it would have been if I had had it!

Anyway, the point it that my interest in The Host didn't result in me stealing any characters, events or plot hooks and writing them into my own story. My English teachers, and probably yours too, were very adamant that we do not plagiarize!

From an academic perspective, they're more concerned that you give credit where credit is due; listing sources and whatnot. As a creative writer, it might be a little harder for some people to notice that you've stolen something, but eventually somebody is gonna figure it out, and you're gonna look like an ass.

“You obviously just took sections out of the Harry Potters and one of the Artemis Fowl books, changed the names and added steampunk laser guns!” These are the last words you hear before Scholastic Books sues you. Probably.

Of course, some people can't help plagiarizing things. Like faces.

“But William! I'm a casual writer! I'm never going to get my work published! My stories are going to live on the internet forever!”

You have to remember that plagiarizing is wrong, regardless of whether or not you get paid for it. Why is it wrong? Some people don't understand why they can't make a book mashup like they do for those Nirvana songs. Yes, you have to watch at least a minute of the following video.

To answer your question, it shows you're lazy. Why would you bother writing something that you're not going to bother to write? You're wasting your time if you do this, plus it leaves you open to pot-shots from the internet community. Maybe your mom has never read Fahrenheit 451 and so misses your clear plagiarism of seashell earbuds, but you can bet your right hand that some guy online has, and he's gonna call you on it.

I knew a girl who would take any idea that “looked cool” and Blend-Tec-blended it into her own stories. It could be anything. Books, movies, comics, television, conversations. After a while you just kind of hesitate to tell her anything because you know it's gonna wind up in her story, and she's probably gonna get paid for it.

There's another kind of plagiarism that affects many people, perhaps even more than the deliberate plagiarizers: Accidental plagiarism!

Lets say you come up with a brilliant idea. You don't know where it came from, but you know it's all you. You've decided to write it down, or draw it, and somebody walks by your desk and says, “hey that looks exactly like Jack Skellington!” Or somebody reads your story and says, “This is just Speed on an airplane instead of a bus!”

I'm not sure why humans tend to do this. Other creatures might do this too, but every time I ask the dog, she just looks at me. We'll probably never know.

Anyway, I think this usually happens because we're tired, or we were half asleep in front of the TV when Twilight Zone was on. It probably comes from bad memory recall. After three years in digital art class critiques, you realize how quickly people compare things to other things. You also realize how hard it is to be original.

It gets even more annoying when your story actually is quite original, but people read it and still make comparisons that you never intended!

Humph!

So I guess my point is that you should always strive for originality. Don't settle for making something “like” something else. Be creative in your creative writing.

Also, you get bonus points if you can guess the name of my favorite photo blog.

Androids (Or, William Has Writer's Block)

2010-08-20T00:00:00.001-07:00

The other day my cousin and I began talking about androids and what would or would not have to happen in order for them to be a viable alternative to human employees.

Henceforth, I'm defining androids as a robot with a human appearance. Some definitions claim that androids must have a human brain at their center, but I'm not using that definition.

This all began because I've been playing Fallout 3. About halfway through the main quest you find a crabby old scientist who asks you to find and return his runaway android. This android has received plastic surgery and a mind wipe, so not even he believes he's an android (the perfect disguise)!

Because I'm playing an incredibly evil character for my fourth play through of this game, I found him and returned him to his slave-like existence. While I did this, I mentioned offhand to my cousin that in a podcast I listen to, they had an episode where they explained the reason real androids will probably be created. Mostly it's because they cost billions of dollars to create, and they'd be doing basically the same jobs as humans. As you might know, it's very cheap to make a baby the old fashioned way, and actually much less work for the manufacturers.

Machines are used in the industrial setting because they are made to do jobs that humans can't do, or that humans can't do as quickly. Think of a mechanical lathe, or those arms that make stuff.

Why the heck would you need a mechanical person to do something that a human can do? My cousin argued that employers might want androids if they needed them to work 24/7/365. But why would you pay billions of dollars for something that you could just hire people to do? I argued that it would probably still be cost effective to simply redesign your factory, or relocate to a new, mechanized one. The cost would (only) be in the millions.

Ultimately we agreed that the only way androids could be practical is if they were relatively easy to make and didn't cost very much. Like in the movie I, Robot.

When I told my sister about this, she pointed out that maybe androids could be useful in totally hostile environments, like on an expedition to Mars or in a completely irradiated area. I counter-pointed-out that it would probably be cheaper to train a person and put them into a specialized suit that could support the same conditions. Again, millions of dollars versus billions.

I mean, I'd like to see a real android as much as the next sci-fi-writing civilian, but I don't think we'll ever see anything like in the movies or books. Sadly.

Oh, sorry I missed Wednesday's blog. Blame Fallout 3!

Self Inserts and the Forgettables

2010-08-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

To begin today's entry, I thought I'd use the definition of Mary Sue from tvtropes.org:

The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealizedversion of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment. She's exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her "flaws" are obviously meant to be endearing.

They also explain that there is some controversy around this definition of Mary Sue, but that's not relevant to this blog. However, I highly recommend reading the rest of the entry.

I could argue that a Mary Sue is a creature who only exists in fan fiction, but that's simply untrue. Published authors across the world have (successfully) inserted themselves into their narrative, much to the dismay of savvy readers everywhere. I would very much like to say that all Mary Sues (or Gary Sues) are amateurish accidents, but that's also untrue.

To avoid further paragraphs in which I essentially say nothing at all, I'll define my version of Mary Sue as follows:

Any character who the writer exclusively characterizes via a series of “what would I do in this situation” questions is a Sue.

I'm going to treat this as a bad habit that needs breaking.

I don't know of anybody who sets out to write fiction that includes themselves on purpose. Typically the Sue rears its ugly head as the main character is being defined. I can understand this. I've accidentally inserted myself into stories too, but they always turned out to be awful. I learned my lesson and moved on.

This is a real bother to authors, especially when you realize sixty pages in that your character is flatter than roadkill and twice as awful. The Sue Problem becomes worse when the author is writing opposite sex characters. Their assumption, “I would do this,” becomes even more obviously wrong when the girl characters seem to share the personality as the main character, his best friend, the guards, the bad guy and the King. This is a problem I have already discussed.

But all is not lost! Everyone has to make these mistakes before they can write something truly great. The best, fastest way to improve at writing is by doing lots of it.

Instead of constantly asking yourself, “what would I do?” you have to figure out who the character is (at least a little bit) beforehand. I know that Steven King likes to have his characters “reveal” themselves over the course of the story, and I enjoy this method too.

However, I like to have a vague picture of them when I'm writing, something along the lines of, “this guy is like this guy who was really annoying in Target the other day,”or “this woman is really like this actress I hate.”

I'm not basing everything off of a personal memory, but I like to have somewhere to start. After I have a good idea of the character on the page, I try to let them grow and have their own personalities, separate from their source material.

In fact, when I'm bored in school or work, I'll write down short descriptions of characters purely in terms of their personality and attitude. They have to be written in any fancy way. After all, they're for your own personal use.

Victoria

She's the kind of person who refers to her father as “my old man.”

She believes she is much prettier than she is.

She talks down to everyone around her.

She wears too much makeup.

She's flirting with me.

That's an actual note I wrote in my notebook during a class a few years ago. She was a jerk.

When you're writing characters, it's a good sign if you can define the character completely in a few pages, or even sentences. Take any fiction novel off the shelf at the bookstore, flip to a random page and read three paragraphs. You will quickly determine three things:

How well or poorly the book is written, in terms of prose and style.

What kind of person the main character is.

What kind of person the author is.

The other end of the Mary Sue spectrum is a slightly different, but nonetheless bothersome problem of Character Forgettability.

What this means is that instead of inserting yourself (or your friends) into your story, you've tried to invent a character and wound up with a shell. The symptoms of Character Forgettability include

Not having a strong opinion one way or the other on much of anything

He/she asks questions, replies, talks to others, but is less interesting than the surrounding characters

Doesn't show much emotion

If I'm spending the whole story scratching my head because I don't know who the main character really is, you might just be a redneck. Ur, you might just need to rethink the whole thing.

Last year I was writing a story. I was stuck with one of the characters; I had made him shout, yell, command and everything else I could think of to make him seem more like a character and less like a shell. I wrote one scene where this character expresses his worry and panic that his love interest might leave him. Midway through the panic, he bursts into tears. Although it sounds ridiculous, making him cry completely defined that character in my mind. After that, I knew who he was and he was much easier to write. This didn't happen until I was halfway through the story, which is actually quite bad, because I should have discovered this sooner.

For me, I realized, it's a characters emotions that define them the most. Just like in real life, you don't really know a person until you've seen them at their emotional extremes.

Write as much as possible, and fill your stories with as much character variety as you can manage.

Gathering the Magic

2010-08-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

All throughout history people have been writing about magic. Some people liked it a little darker than others, and some people kept it whimsical and child-friendly.

There are many differences; where the magical power source comes from, who can use what, Black Magic (capitalized), what you have to do to make magic take effort, whether or not it requires ingredients, whether or not it requires a wand, whether or not it's gender-restricted, whether or not it's illegal, et cetera, et cetera.

When you boil it all down you notice that it's all kind of similar. Pretty much something supernatural happens and it chalked up to magic. Here's the dictionary definition(s) for your reading pleasure.

magic |ˈmajik|

noun

the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces : do you believe in magic? | suddenly, as if by magic, the doors start to open.

• mysterious tricks, such as making things disappear and appear again, performed as entertainment.

• a quality that makes something seem removed from everyday life, esp. in a way that gives delight : the magic of the theater.

• informal something that has such a quality : their seaside town is pure magic.

One of the most important things to take away from these definitions are that magic usually contains some sense of wonder. This is something that some writers tend to forget making magic into this mundane thing which is hardly worth noticing.

It's like how people take amazing things for granted today that a hundred years ago would have been miraculous: People taking a ride from one side of the world to the other on a giant metal bird. Communicating instantly with people who live on entirely different continents. A global network of people who can exchange information almost instantly.

And do you know what we use this technology for? Sending videos of dogs farting and people falling off skateboards.

Sorry about the rant (borrowed from a comedian whose name I forget).

Magic shouldn't be boring but that's how it's portrayed in some books. It's got no snap; it has no crackle.

My dear readers: It has no pop.

As I mentioned in another blog, I find that magic is more satisfying when it's difficult to achieve. To paraphrase Robert Frost, the things worth doing in life aren't easy. I believe that this philosophy should be applied to magic as well.

“But William!” you begin to argue, “I thought Magick was supposed to make things easy! What's the point of writing magic in a story if not everybody can do it?”

I like to think of magic like if you crossed a screwdriver with an automatic shotgun; it's useful as a tool but dangerous as hell and you probably shouldn't let your kids play with it.

I hate seeing stories where every minor character has some kind of godlike magical power. I think it reflects a certain amount of laziness in the mind of the author. I mean, a lot of problems are going to pop up if everyone in the world can teleport at will without any kind of repercussion. This is one of the reasons Harry Potter's brand of magic succeeded; there was always something that could go wrong. Always. If an inexperienced wizard tried to disapparate, they could get stuck in a wall or splinch themselves into different places. These kinds of rules are what keeps magic from being too easy. This brings me to my next point: Accountability.

Just like the real world, most people only follow rules as long as there's a punishment for disobeying them. I learned this as a child, but most people alive today have yet to learn this simple lesson. If you get caught driving too fast, you get a ticket. If there were no police then people would drive as fast as they wanted everywhere (though in some places they already do). Streets would be incredibly dangerous places. When you're writing your story, what's keeping the characters from magically exploding an entire village? Or turning everyone into pigs and frying them up?

Now, I'm not saying that you need to have a magical DMV in your story who annoyingly tightens their grip on all things magic (though that premise might work as the main plot in a story). Let me paint a picture for you.

You've got a villain in your story who is incredibly powerful. In fact, you've only shown him exercising his endless power over every other character. As far as the reader knows, there nothing he can't do. What's stopping him from ripping the planet in two? Or at the very least teleporting into the hero's bedroom and killing him in his sleep? This is where another vital part of magic-making comes into play: The power source.

In video games this is typically called mana. I don't know why it's called that, but it's essentially a pool of magical energy that you draw on for spells. Once you're out of mana, you have to find a way to get it back.

Although it serves its purpose in video games, mana doesn't make as much sense in a story. I guess you could have your characters cry, “I'm out of mana!” after a fight, but to non-gamers this phrase doesn’t make much sense. Authors have a variety of tools at their disposal for giving magic-users a source of magic. They can be almost anything, but the list includes:

Holy power: Usually a thinly-veiled reference to God or angels. Can also be a more abstract “light” that the character receives from on high.

Demonic power: From the spirit world, from demons themselves, or received as a previous bargain made with a demon.

Elemental power: From those four incredibly overused elements, Earth Wind Fire and Water.

Trinket power: From an item or items carried by the hero. This could be their armor, a necklace, a sword, etc.

From-gods power: Think of Hercules, his power is just a “gift” until he angers the gods.

Well of Power: There's a ton of magical energy that is drawn by the character somehow. It doesn't even have to be nearby to be used.

Tradeoff power: The character is incredibly tired afterward, sometimes to the extreme. Or they become dehydrated as they spell, or they age, or someone in their family dies, or their soul is sucked away.

Ceremonial power: This is the kind of crap that I detest. I hate reading about seances, chanting, pentagrams or anything else that requires Hollywood Voodoo. Usually used by the bad guys, but sometimes by the good guys. If I encounter this stuff in a book, I will deeply consider stopping.

Then there are stories where it doesn't cost a thing to create magic, it's just very hard for the character to do. Theoretically a person could be so good at magic that they would never have to stop, except maybe for sleep. In Diana Wynn-Jones's books, her characters don't have a limited amount of it, but it's typically very hard. Sometimes it even requires ingredients or a ceremony or something. It's so hard to do that people mostly rely on professionals to do it. Even the bad guys sometimes use more conventional means of getting their way (imprisonment, bullying, espionage, murder and so on.)

On the other hand, Harry Potter has a great system where the difficulty of the spell is based upon how hard the wand-motion is, plus a strange Latin word. Later on, we even learned about nonverbal spells, which were almost impossible for most of the characters. Without wands, the characters were completely unable to use magic. I thought this was an interesting tradeoff and it worked well for the story.

The point I'm trying to make is that you need to avoid making your characters superhuman; look at Spiderman: Even with his super-powers, he's still one of the most (relatively) weak heroes in all of comics.

It's seeing him overcome almost impossible odds that make him so endearing (that and his witty banter.)

If you don't follow these suggestions, you risk making your main characters into a Mary-Sue, but that's a topic for another day.

Writing Medieval Fantasy

2010-08-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

Most fantasy stories take place in medieval times. Usually these medieval times seem almost exactly like current time, complete with whiny teenagers and indoor plumbing. Many writers don't know much about this particular era in time. As I have done before (and will do again), here's a list of things I know off the top of my head, followed by a list of things I don't know about the Middle Ages.

The Black Plague happen around then. Lots of people died. There were these super-cool priests who wore these terrifying bird-masks.

There were knights, queens, princesses, dukes, duchesses, peasants, and landlords. The caste system was very important but awful for the people at the bottom.

The food was awful if you were a peasant, and slightly less awful if you were a King.

Peasants never married princesses (unless you're talking about China, but we're focusing on a more European setting.)

Horses were ridden everywhere, and they require quite a bit of work to take care of.

(Sidebar: As of 2010, many, many people hold to romanticized (or Disneyized) notions of what it is or is not like to have a horse. I have talked to at least one girl who was convinced that owning a horse was an almost mythical experience. Having been around horses quite a lot myself, I was able to say with confidence that owning a horse is like owning a really large, quite expensive dog. Having never been around horses, she disagreed.)

Lots of people starved to death. This was not an isolated thing, either. Ever heard of the Irish Potato Famine? Well, it's not really in medieval times, but it's a famine. So there.

Tapestries hung in castles were to keep the warmth in and the echoes and breezes down. Plus they looked pretty.

Suits of armor weight a ton.

Here be dragons.

What many people fail to grasp when writing in this setting are things like:

How does a monarchy actually work?

What is the purpose of a King holding court every day?

What is a count and how does one attain such a title? What is his purpose?

Does everyone really talk like in Romeo and Juliet?

Now, I'm not trying to make your exciting medieval story into a boring research paper. I'm just pointing out that usually the world behind the story is pretty thin. You don't need to go and research all of the questions that I brought up, but it wouldn't hurt to know some of them. And even still, you probably don't need to know it unless your plot centers around political intrigue.

If you want a really excellent example of a modern book written about medieval times, read Michael Crichton's Timeline. Seeing the movie doesn't count. I learned more from Crichton's heavily, heavily-researched Lords-and-Ladies book than a dozen textbooks on the subject (mostly because his book actually held my interest.)

But I've gotten ahead of myself. There are several pitfalls you want to avoid (or purposely enter, if you're snarky) when writing in this setting.

The Princess Bride. No, I'm not talking about the cult movie, I'm referring to the fact that in most of the (bad) stories I've read, the hero always gets the girl, who is also a princess. Or a princess in disguise. Or a lower-ranking member of the court who happens to be the true heir to the throne which she inherits at the end of the story. Or she's a peasant who (guess what!) somehow becomes queen. You see where I'm going with this. If I were writing the story, I'd steer very clear of this ever-so-overused trope. In fact, if there were a princess, she wouldn't even be a character in the story. If she were, she'd get killed because we'd hate her. No, better yet, just cut her out completely. What is the lesson here, anyway? Are men only supposed to be attracted to women who hold governmental power over them? Is this some kind of feminism kick that's been around since before feminism? I dunno.

Though the Chrestomanci and Howl's Moving Castle books did a great job of using this trope in an interesting way.

The Mysterious Hermit. Lots of stories have these, and not just fantasy ones. Even Star Wars had Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi. You know the character: He doesn't really seem very helpful, but he gives character advice to the hero that later comes in handy. He doesn't even have to be loveable; pretty much he can be Doctor House when it comes to a personality, but the main characters still hang around him more than they should.

You know what, I just realized that this advice is really not limited to fantasy stories. The same kinds of themes can be seen in everything from sci-fi to romance novels. In fact, there are probably sci-fi-romance novels that use all of these things.

Though when people write about medieval times, they usually include magic, something that probably wasn't used at the time. There are many things to avoid in this kind of medieval magic-tale as well.

Pretty much writers using magic have a convenient catch-all that can do everything that they can't. This can take the form of the amazing bag of holding from the final Harry Potter book, or something more needlessly complicated like nearly any kind of magic from Discworld. Some authors realize how ridiculous some magic is and make an effort to mock it.

I prefer magic to be something a little more difficult to achieve; that is, more like a simple algebra problem in that it takes some time to work out, but it's not as easy as breathing.

“I flicked my hand an teleported across the world,” is less interesting than something with a little more challenge and danger. I think I'll save the Difficult Magic discussion for Friday's blog.

Then again, your story could be more like the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion; there's not really any interaction with people outside of them asking for help, being murdered by vampires or getting crushed to death by watermelons.

If there is a moral to this story, it's that you should read at least one good medieval fantasy book before jumping in and writing one. The cliches that I've listed aren't necessarily bad things, even; I'm sure any savvy reader will be able to find at least two or three books that feature one (or all) them. They're not really the kind of stuff that kills a story, but if you think of them like adjectives, they can create bad habits that encourage bad writing. Almost like how urine attracts bacteria.

That's right: Cliches are like urine. That's a good sentiment to finish the blog on.

Suggest the Best!

2010-08-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

Now is the time, gentle readers, to make suggestions for blog topics!

My list is running dangerously short, so now is your chance to make your voice heard. If not your voice, then your words, written in the comments section below. Give me your top 3, 5, 10 or even 20 topics! Heck, make it 100!

I'm having a rather serious case of writer's blog, ur, block. In fact, maybe that will be one of the topics! Who knows!

Make sure to comment quickly, because I have nothing written for Wednesday and Friday!

Yours Faithfully,

The Sign Painter

The Goldilocks Zone

2010-08-06T00:00:00.001-07:00

Length.

When writing, the first thing I think about is how long my story should be. Do I want a short story? A novella? A full-blown Steven King-sized novel? Do I have the patience to write that much about one thing? Do I have enough stuff in mind to fill that kind of book?

All of these question are the wrong questions. What you should always be thinking about is your writing. Don't worry about page length or how heavy your book is going to be when it's published. You're really getting ahead of yourself.

When I was little, somebody showed me how to make a little booklet by taking four or five pages of 8.5 x 11 printer paper, folding it in half and putting three staples into the “spine.” This always resulted in eight or ten pages of booklet that I would draw or write on.

Typically I would only use the first two or three pages, leaving the rest completely blank. I always felt like I was wasting paper (probably because I was), but I never wanted to continue drawing in the last few pages of the booklet because that book was finished. The same kind of psychology happens when you're writing with the explicit purpose of filling pages. If you're filling pages just for the sake of it, those are the pages that people will either skim or read a dozen times on accident while thinking about lunch. You want every single word to be important, so why waste pages?

If someone gave you a nice Moleskine notebook and you decided that you were going to write an entire story in it, you'd discover:

The story would end a few dozen pages before the end of the notebook, leaving room for doodles and grocery lists.
The story would NOT end before the end of the book, meaning you'd have to write the spillover in another notebook or on the computer, meaning your story is inconveniently located in two places (or three or four).

You want to write the story until you say what you wanted to say. If it just keeps going and going then people are going to know it.

Your story might total five pages; it might total five hundred. Either way, don't try to stretch or shrink anything (unless you're trying to write something for a writing contest, in which case they'll almost definitely make you cut down the word-count.)

The Goldilocks Zone is this: Not to long and not too short; juuuuuust right.

Describe Description

2010-08-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

Today's entry depends heavily on personal preference. As far as I know, there's no right or wrong way to go about describing things. Some writers are very good at it and some very bad. Others don't even try, and others still will only describe things in a simple, off-hand way that gives the imagination just enough to get by.

And then there's the difference between the descriptions of people versus places and things. When it comes to writing people, some people like to go in full-bore and illustrate a person down to the last thread of string dangling from a tweed elbow, while others need only throw the barest of ideas our way to convey what they mean. Strangely, others can get by without even mentioning a person in terms of their physical attributes, relying instead upon personalities and attitudes. This gives us an approximation of a character instead of a solid picture, which has some benefits. In most books, the main characters themselves are left almost completely abstract, letting the reader fill in the blanks. When the writer actually does have to describe something to us, their addition is (usually) seamlessly integrated in with our own ideas of the person. I know I cite this a lot, but in Harry Potter, Harry is loosely described as a “skinny, scrawny boy with floppy hair and a scar on his forehead.” Other than that, Harry looks however we want him to. Interestingly, the description was enough that when I saw Daniel Radcliffe in the movies, I thought, “sure enough, that's what he looks like!”
Some writers have taken such advantage of this that books have been written in which the reader has no idea what gender the character is, or even that the characters were actually a family of birds. At least, not until the last page.

Now it's time for some teaching examples to help ease your mind into mine. What follows are depictions of characters listed in each of the ways I've described, starting from the least detail to the most.

Low detail personality sketch:
Simon always looked over-dressed, but upon seeing the terrified expression on his face, one could imagine that his clothes were the only thing helping him believe he was suited for the job.

Medium detail personality sketch:
One further understood Simon's expression upon meeting his boss, Mr. Maddigan, who only ever just seemed to be keeping his rage under control. Maybe his rage stemmed from being so short, or because of the fact that he had gone bald much earlier than everyone else in his family. In fact, some people believed that Maddigan was compensating for the loss of hair on his head by growing an incredibly thick mustache.

High detail personality sketch, minus physical description:
However, to fully understand Maddigan, one had to meet his wife Patricia. She and him had married quite late in life, and so they were both quite set in their ways. Patricia and her husband lived in a house too large for both of them, but neither were brave enough to say anything. The house mostly belonged to Patricia, anyway. She had taken it over like a virus. She fancied herself to be quite good at embroidery, despite the fact that she wasn't. This was probably because she disliked using patterns. The entire house was filled with things she had embroidered; pillows, blankets, quilts and clothes; her thirst for sewing was insatiable. Patricia constantly lost her needles in the carpet, only to be found later by Mr. Maddigan's squashy feet.

Low detail sketch, with physical:
But the whole reason Patricia had gotten into sewing was because of a woman named Veronica Green.
Veronica had been a supermodel in the 1960s, and still behaved as if she were twenty-one. Quite headstrong, she never dressed in anything except low-cut shirts and short skirts, much to the disgust of everyone around her. Seeing a sixty-five year-old woman dressed in this way is quite distressing, after all, no matter how good she looks for her age. She also happened to be excellent at sewing.

Medium detail, with physical:
Veronica had a sister who was considerably younger than her. A whole ten years, in fact. Her name was Melanie. She had held up much better than Veronica; she practically lived at the gymnasium, and so her skin had stayed tight on her, unlike Veronica. Melanie looked even younger than she was; her predisposition toward not-smiling had kept the crow's feed away from her angular face, and her stress-free life of luxury kept the white hairs at bay. Just to be safe, she never let her hair go more than two weeks without a fresh dye. The argument could be made that she paid more attention to her hair than to her own children, of which she had four.

High detail, with physical:
That day, Melanie's youngest daughter Anna had to visit the grocery store to buy milk, which was where she met Simon.
From Simon's point of view, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen entered his checkout line. Her thick Brown hair fell around her face like a Greek goddess, highlighting her high cheekbones and vivid green eyes. Although she was wearing gray hospital scrubs, Simon still found her incredibly alluring. From Anna's point of view, Simon was quite attractive. Horrified, she realized she hadn't looked in a mirror for the entire day.

I feel like I'm not succeeding with "high detail." Maybe I shouldn't call it that.

My personal preference seems to lean toward describing people in terms of their personality instead of their physical qualities. I've always thought that if I can describe someone and make them seem attractive, I can wriggle away from the commitment of meticulously listing their physical characteristics. Personally I don't enjoy writing about flowing brown hair or high cheekbones, because those traits aren't universally attractive. What if I was raised in the Middle East and found that kind of look to be too American? Or if I was from Jamaica and preferred my women to be browner?

This is to say nothing of describing locations. There's just too much for one blog. Try a few different styles and see what you're good at.

Writing After the Apocalypse

2010-08-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

With the advent of word processors, it's never been easier for an aspiring writer to sit down and tap out something on their computer in no time at all. In the forward for Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury explains that he had to use a pay-for-time typewriter to type up his manuscript for the book. He didn't have a lot of money at the time, so he would type as fast as humanly possible for his half hour in order to maximize his dime. He did this every day for nine days. If you can imagine typing up a 25,000-word book on an old library typewriter in half-hour increments, then you can see just how lucky were are to have these fancy computer-machines with this convenient Undo function.

This, in addition to smarty-phones.

However, since the nuclear bombs fell, we're all living in a different world: Since there's no more electricity, aspiring writers are forced to find another means of getting their ideas onto the page. If you were raised on word processors, you'll have a more difficult time adjusting to the old hand-written way of life that we now all must share.

I personally use this new-fangled manner of story-writing called Word Processing, but using the pen (or pencil) and paper has certain perks (or quirks) that you don't know about until you're actually doing it.

For one, writing by hand is dramatically slower. The English printed alphabet wasn't made for writing, it was made for the printing press. The form of written English that was actually made for the human hand (cursive) has fallen so far out of use that by 2020 nobody under the age of 21 will know how to read it. This means that our blocky text doesn't lend itself to speedy writing.

(I know this is actually the Russian alphabet, but I thought it looked cool.)

“But William!” you might say, “I can write nearly as fast as I can type! You're wrong in every way!”

If this is true for you, then you're amazing (and probably alone). However, creative writing isn't like taking notes in a class where you have more information to write than you know what to do with. The trick with handwriting something isn't how fast you're doing it, anyway, it's the content. This brings me to the next part of writing by hand: Spelling and definitions!

Since there are no more functioning computers, which were a veritable Swiss Army Knife of useful writing tools, you're going to feel a little vulnerable. This is because you don't have Google sitting in front of you (they were the first to go when the bombs fell). If you suddenly can't remember if haggard is a verb or an adjective, you're going to have to pull open a physical Dictionary (if you can find one) and remember how the alphabet song goes. This is a common writing phenomenon that I call “forgettaworditus,” and it affects millions of writers each year (probably). Usually when it happens, writers who don't want to lose that terrific train of thought they were riding decide to forget all of that and simply use a different word. The same thing goes for spelling. If you're anything like me, you realize very quickly how heavily you lean on the spell-checker when writing.

“Oh my gosh, I can't spell phenomenon, vulnerable, beautiful or increments off the top of my head! WAA!”

Yes, all of those words except “beautiful” are words that I had to right-click spell correct while writing this very blog.

Yes yes, I know that writing by hand makes your hand tired, it takes too long and you have to type it up afterwards, but whenever I write things by hand, lets say in Art Appreciation when inspiration strikes, the things I write turn out differently than they would if I had a computer in front of me. I find that I make character, grammar and word decisions differently than I would with a word processor. I'm not sure if there's a reason other than “to save time” for any of these changes, but I tend to think that it comes out more succinctly.

(Quick, somebody google “succinctly!”)

(Oh wait, you can't. Apocalypse.)

Sunday Anniversary Bonus

2010-08-01T05:30:00.000-07:00

Since it's been one month since I first started this blog, (hooray!) I've decided to give everyone a story to read, if only to prove that I don't actually only write advice.

This story is called Maladroit. I wrote it about a year ago. There are things in the story that I would change if I wrote it again. Tell me what you think in the comments!

There was a whirring noise when I woke up. It sounded like an old computer booting up. A rushing sound filled my ears, it sounded like I was underwater. Something was making my back itch. It felt like I was laying down on the worst mattress ever made. I opened my eyes slowly. The ceiling fell into focus. The tiles on the ceiling had a staggered pattern that irritated me for some unknown reason. Fluorescent lights hummed softly, filling the room with greenish-white light. I tried to sit up, but my legs didn't want to move. I couldn't feel any pain, which I thought was odd. Hopefully it was a good thing.

I craned my neck in an attempt to see where I was. It was a grayish room. A little bit like a hospital. There were other beds with cloth partitions keeping them separate from each other. Across the room I could just see the outline of another patient on the bed across from mine. He looked confused, and he was also craning his head and looking around. Maybe it was a ward for people with spinal injuries? There were two doors at the end of the room, the kind with that fogged glass that you see in hospitals. The writing on the door was backwards. I tried to make it out, but my brain did a sort of spasm when I tried, so I decided it would be safer if I didn't read it.

Just then, there was an astonishing pain throughout my body. It whipped through me like electricity, and then it was gone. It was like my blood had suddenly caught on fire. I would have screamed, but it was gone before I could gasp. A dull, throbbing pain remained in my body, gnawing at me whenever I moved.

I chanced looking up again. There was a clock near the door that I hadn't noticed before, I tried to read it, but the writing was backwards. Why would a clock be backwards? It was then I realized that the room was much smaller than I first thought. There was a mirror on the opposite wall. For such an easy realization, it seemed like an epiphany to me. I also read the writing on the reflected door, it said “CONTAINMENT 2.”

Just what needed to be contained, anyway? Surely I wasn't a health risk. I felt something physically click in my head. That had never happened before. Maybe I was brain damaged? After all, I couldn't remember doing anything to get to this room. Retrograde amnesia. Why was it that I was able to remember something that I had learned in high school, and yet I couldn't remember much more than my name?

“Adam Caldwell,” I said out loud. The noise didn't go very far, which was surprising. The sound didn't echo. At least I knew my name, at any rate. And I suppose I knew that I was a man. My age was a little hazy.

I leaned back against the table I was laying on. It wasn't a bed by any stretch of the imagination. It was the same kind of stainless steel table that veterinarians examined animals on. I recalled seeing some long-forgotten pet being euthanized on that table. On the bright side, there was another memory. My brain wasn't too far gone to be saved, after all. That was good news, but I still felt sad.

Checkers the cat. That was the animal who had been euthanized.

Maybe I was panicking. Whatever it was, it didn't feel good. I also felt I was forgetting something, as if I had already made a critical realization and then forgotten it.

It was then I noticed that the room actually had a mirror on the opposite wall, making it appear much bigger than it was. The door, which I had previously been unable to read, was easily readable in the reflection. It said “CONTAINMENT 2.” I wonder what was supposed to be contained in this room. There wasn't anyone around except myself and the man across the room. Wait.

I craned my neck again and looked back at my reflection. It was hard to make out features from where I was, and I could only just see him. My eyes hurt from looking downward so hard; it was like trying to see your own lips. I put my head back down. My head clicked again.

“Dammit!” I said, without meaning to. It seemed that my brain was doing things on its own, because I had never meant to speak. The the rear of my tongue was doing strange muscle spasms that left my whole mouth feeling cramped.

The digital clock said it was 55:2 in the mirror, so that made it 2:55. Unfortunately it didn't specify whether it was AM or PM. It was a shame that America hadn't adopted the much more usable European twenty-four hour clock. It was probably AM. That meant that there wouldn't be anyone along to check on me until morning. I wasn't tired, anyway. I felt like I had just slept for eighteen hours straight, and my brain and body weren't in the mood for more. In fact, I felt like I might develop bedsores if I stayed in bed much longer.

I tried to sit up again and did much better this time. The pain from my convulsion was still there, lurking somewhere backstage. I shuffled my shoulders, inching up the wall slowly. My legs still weren't responding, so I had to hold the table with my hands and force myself upward. Once I was sitting up against the wall, I noticed that I was wearing a hospital robe. Of course I was.

I could now clearly see myself in the mirror across the room. A gaunt, but good-looking man peered back at me. My head was wrapped in bandages. My face was exposed, but my hair was completely obscured by the bandage. I briefly wondered what my hair looked like. They probably shaved it off, anyway, by the looks of things. Usually head bandages meant some kind of cranial trauma, or at the very least, surgery. At least I knew why I was having trouble remembering things.

I breathed a sigh of relief, though I still felt a little worried. I itched my nose. As I did, I noticed my hand. It was bigger than I recalled, but more importantly, the skin looked a little strange. I couldn't remember exactly what my skin looked like, but I distantly recalled bonier wrists, and a lot more arm hair. My arms and hands now looked like they might belong to a baseball player. My wrists seemed thicker, and much less hairy. I was probably just imagining things, anyway. You don't just wake up and notice your arms are different, I was probably remembering seeing someone with the arms and hands I remembered. My brain was probably damaged.

I heard someone unlock the door at the end of the room. I could see their wavy outline through the glass. The steel door handle turned and in stepped a forgettable-looking nurse wearing those awful flowered scrubs that so many nurses wear. She entered and immediately locked the door behind her. She turned around, saw me looking at her and gave me a tired smile, the kind that you know a thousand other patients have seen that day, so you know you're not special. A forced, well-worn smile, but not the kind she used around her family. It was her work-smile. I tried to smile back, but the muscles seemed too tired.

“You're up I see,” said the nurse, walking over to my bed and pulling the chart out of the basket at the foot of the bed.

“That's right,” I said. She made a note on the chart as she replied.

“Do you know where you are?” she asked pleasantly.

“I don't remember much,” I said, “except my name.”

She stopped writing. Her eyes flicked from the chart to my face. Her smile faded.

There was a moment of silence while I waited for her to speak.

“That's good,” she said, the smile returning once again, “I'm Cherise, I work nights here, I've been taking care of you while you've been under.”

“It's nice to meet you Cherise,” I said, “I would shake your hand, but I'm having trouble moving my limbs.”

“Oh, that's normal,” she reassured me. She was scribbling furiously on the chart.

“Can you tell me how long you've been awake?” she asked.

“Ten minutes, I'd guess,” I said.

“Have you experienced any discomfort? Pain? Headaches? Numbness?”

“Um, a little of everything, actually,” I said, “I was in a lot of pain just after I woke up, it felt like I'd been struck by lightning.”

Just then I noticed that there was nurse standing in front of me, clasping a clipboard and writing on it furiously. She looked hispanic, and she was wearing ugly flower-patterned scrubs. She was looking at me expectantly.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“You don't remember?” she asked.

“I don't remember you,” I said, “I was alone in here just a second ago.”

“I'm Sarah,” she said, “I've been your nurse here since you arrived, I'm the night shift. You're lucky that you got out of that accident.”

“Hello Sarah,” I said, “I'm Adam, and I don't feel right.”

Her pen was flying over the paper. Her writing was sure to look like Arabic by the time she finished.

“Adam Caldwell?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

She finished writing.

“I'll be back in a few hours,” she said, folding the clipboard under her arm. She clicked her pen once and put it into her front pocket. “Get some sleep, there will be some people here in the morning to speak with you.”

“What kind of people?” I asked.

“Goodnight,” she said.

I nodded awake a moment later. I was still propped up against the wall, but Sarah was gone. She must have turned off the lights when she left, because the room was dark. I could just see the orange glow of morning coming from door-window, but it was distant. I sat there for what seemed like a long time, watching it become brighter.

The lights clicked on again. I looked over at my reflection again. I still looked pale and sad. How strange it was that I didn't remember my own face.

Someone unlocked the door again, and in came three men and a female nurse. It wasn't Sarah.

“Good,” said one of the men, “he's awake.”

They walked over to me. The nurse moved aside the partitions so they could surround me. It was unsettling.

“Good morning, Adam,” said one of the men. He was large, and slightly grandfatherly. His paunch bulged over his belt, but he was dressed as if there were a blizzard outside. He smiled down at me. Even though I was sitting up, the men still towered over me.

“What's so good about it?” I asked, “I feel like a prisoner.”

The men exchanged glances.

“You're not a prisoner here, Adam,” said the grandfatherly man, betraying the slightest of southern accents. He sounded like a friendly plantation owner from Alabama. “You can leave whenever you like. It's just that you're not healthy enough to be out in the world. We're taking care of you.

“Oh how rude of me, we haven't introduced ourselves. I'm Johnathan Price,” he extended his hand to shake, I shook it, but his squeeze hurt my hand.

“Ow! Damn!” I said, retracting my hand.

“Still sensitive to pressure,” whispered one of the other men.

“My apologies,” said Mr. Price, “these are my colleagues,” he gestured to the spindly-framed man who had whispered, “this is William Fullerton, and that's Lewis Warhol,” the last man had the demeanor of a mafia boss. He was fat and richly dressed. He glared down at me like a butcher appraising meat.

“Wheelchair,” said Mr. Price to the nurse. She nodded and left the room.

“We have some good news for you, Mr. Caldwell,” said Mr. Price. It seemed that he was going to do all of the talking.

“Good news?” I said.

“It would seem that you didn't die,” said Mr. Price, “and that is very good news for both of us.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“You don't yet. But you will.”

The nurse reappeared, pushing a wheelchair.

The nurse and Mr. Fullerton hoisted me into the wheelchair with little difficulty. Mr. Price began pushing me out of the room.

“You represent the future, Adam,” he said.

“Do I?” I looked into the mirror he pushed me past it. I looked even more unfamiliar up close. It was only for a moment, then we were out of the room and into the hallway. I could see the twitchy Mr. Fullerton talking in excited hisses to Mr. Warhol.

“The industry of tissue reconstruction is at its inception,” said Mr. Price, “I have some investors that are going to take great interest in you.”

“What for? Did I lose a limb?”

There was a pause, then Price said, “in a manner of speaking.”

I was pushed down the hallway and into another darkened room that was filled with computer monitors. The monitors were displaying different close-up x-rays of a various part of somebody's body. There were a few people in the room behind computers. They all wore lab coats and most wore glasses.

“Adam,” said Price, “three weeks ago, you died.”

I turned in the wheelchair and looked at Price. “And you revived me?”

“No,” he said, “you were...” he paused and grimaced, “decapitated.”

I looked down at my body. “Are you saying that I just 'got better?'”

“No, Adam. You died. Your body is gone, destroyed. They even had a funeral for you.”

On the monitors it played footage of sad-looking people standing in a graveyard.

“This is your funeral. Do you remember any of these people?”

I looked closely at the faces.

“I don't!” I said, “but what you're saying--that I died--why am I here now? How is this possible?”

The people behind the computers looked up and smiled at Mr. Price, then looked down at me like proud parents.

There was a moment of silence. It was uncomfortable.

“You're an android, Adam,” said Price, “the first of your kind.” He barely concealed his excitement. It was like I was a prize-winning dog.

I was speechless.

“Well technically, only your body is,” said one of the researchers, standing up from his computer, “it's an immensely complicated procedure.”

“You were dead,” interrupted Price, “they took you to the hospital. Your were listed as an organ donor, so we took your brain. Of course, your remaining organs were giving to the hospital, for their personal use,” he cleared his throat.

“I'm Dr. Hastings,” said the researcher, stepping over to me and shaking my hand gently, “I oversaw the creation process of your body.” Everyone seemed excited.

“So I'm... a robot?” I said.

Several people spoke at once, including Price.

“No--”

“It's not like that--”

“Technically--”

“--What we've done is too advanced to be called robotics,” said Dr. Hastings, “the technology won't be mainstream for another twenty years--”

At that point, the world was starting to go dark. I had passed out before, but never from shock. I had a certain weakness toward blood; the sight of it was always enough to make me feel dizzy, but I had never encountered anything like this. It seemed ironic now, the last part of me that was really me was going to do the only thing over which I had any control, and that was to pass out. I looked up at Dr. Hastings as a circle of dark fog surrounded my vision, encasing his head in a ring of hazy darkness.

“He's passing out,” said someone. They like they were speaking to me from one end of a long, echoing hallway.

“Don't let him,” I heard Price say, “we just got him awake, and I want to keep him that way,”

I felt some pressure on my left arm. I looked over to see what it was. Of course it was a needle, injecting something into my arm that looked like milk. My eyes rolled and I felt my head fall backward.

There was a surge of energy in my chest, my eyes snapped open and I sat up. It was like having caffeine injected into my heart. I exhaled deeply.

“What was that?” I asked, “adrenaline to the heart?”

There were a few more people standing around me now, looking a little apprehensive.

“You don't really have a heart anymore, Adam,” said one of them, “now you have a little motorized pump that--”

“Don't tell him about those kind of things,” said Price, “we don't want another faint.”

The researcher bowed away.

Hastings knelt down in front of me and said, “it was synthetic compound that's made specially for your body.”

“It looked like milk,” I said, feeling like I could run a marathon.

“Well, it's based on milk,” Hastings said. “It's calcium, lubricants, vitamins and many other things.” He stood back up and looked over my head toward Price.

“Why can't I move my legs?” I asked.

“I'm sorry,” said one of the female researchers, looking up at Price, “we haven't turned them on yet.”

Everyone looked at Price.

“Turn 'em on, then,” he said. The room seemed to relax a little.

The female researcher grabbed something that looked like a police stun gun from a table and walked over to me.

“Lean down,” she said, “this has to touch your spine.”

I obliged. She untied the hospital gown a little. With her fingertips, she gently crept down my spine until she found the spot she had in mind. I felt pressure against my vertebrae and a mild electric shock.

“All done,” she said stepping away and smiling at me. I wiggled my toes. I could feel pins and needles in my feet.

“Any scientific explanation as to why a robotic –ur, android-- foot might fall asleep?” I asked, “I'm feeling pins and needles here.”

The room was silent for a moment, then Dr. Hastings said, “Paresthesia could be because of your panic attack,”

“Or a blood clot,” said the female scientist. They were talking more to each other than they were to me.

“It should be fine,” said Price quickly, “Adam and I have business elsewhere. The scientists nodded and went back to their computers. It seemed that I was quite the spectacle.

Mr. Price wheeled me out of the room. I was expecting him to talk, but he didn't. He left me alone with my thoughts for the moment.

An artificial body with the brain of a human? This seemed like something out of science fiction. Had technology really advanced this much? What had happened to my family? Of course, I didn't even know if I had a family, but I at least knew enough people to fill a funeral procession. Was I really even human anymore? Did I have a soul? What about my old body? Was this new one supposed to be stronger? Sort of a bionic commando? I wasn't going to fight any wars for these people. I didn't feel any stronger, but then again, I wasn't sure what it would feel like to be strong as an android. Apparently I could feel pain. What about pleasure? Happiness? I was sure I was feeling fear already. Most of those things seemed tied up in the last bit of humanity that I possessed; my brain. It seemed that my life as I knew it, was over.

The Mysterious Beast Called Woman

2010-07-30T00:00:00.000-07:00

So you're writing a story. Maybe you're pretty far through it already. There are a few female characters in the periphery, but mostly you write male characters. Later on, you decide the next section needs to be told from the perspective of the Prospective Girlfriend; in horror you realize that you have no idea how to write women. At least, not really.

You see, writing a male character is quite easy; even female authors can quite easily approximate how a man's mind works. Just look at the male characters in something by J.K. Rowling, Harper Lee, Diana Wynn Jones or countless other female authors. The reason it's so easy is because men's minds are simply constructed when compared to the mind of a woman. I'm not trying to make a “men are dumb” or “women are smart” argument; I don't want to seem like a sexist from either side. I'm just trying to make a few observations.

In a work of writing, male minds make a good baseline for how a person thinks, or at least how a person thinks they think. Just imagine a goal, then imagine the path of least resistance to get there. The male mind is this path. If and when women try to achieve the same goal, they might go about it a different way. I find myself thinking of my baby nieces and nephews. Talk about a detailed study in the difference in male and female brains.

Girls are crafty.

Some authors write women as if they're some kind of mythical, rules-of-nature-bending beast. Their characters' minds don't seem to follow any kind of logic, because the male writer doesn't actually know many women. The female characters' actions are erratic. They're either super sexualized, annoyingly macho or disgustingly demure. Either that or the author just writes his version of the Perfect Woman™, which brings its own problems. This is to say nothing of the awful, stilted dialogue.

This isn't to say that male authors can't write women. C.S. Lewis knew what he was doing, and actually made a point of getting into the female mind and poking around a bit, resulting in female characters more believable than girl characters written by actual girls.

There's no magic formula one can use to determine the proper woman. Most of it comes down to experience. If you've known many, many women in your life, you're probably going to have a better understanding of them than a shut-in who plays World of Warcraft all year (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Again, this falls into the Writing What You Know category. More specifically, it falls into a subcategory called Not Writing What You Don't Know. This is INCREDIBLY important when it comes to romance. Good grief, don't write romance if you've never kissed a person before. Please, please spare us. This one particular reason that I can't stand romance novels: They're often written by a person who hasn't done the things they're writing about; they're written by a person who has heavily imagined what it must be like to do those things.

Now, I'm not saying you should stay away from writing women completely. As minor characters they can be good for a laugh (especially when the author knows what they're talking about), or some colorful exposition. In fact, I recommend reading as many books as you can that are written by women. This shouldn't be hard, as there are tons. As you could probably tell, my recommendations are Harry Potter and anything by Diana Wynn Jones. On a side note, if you have something signed by her, I recommend you hang onto it, because I don't think she'll live to see 2011, sadly.

Who knows, you might actually succeed when you try to write women. Remember, though, that just because you happen to be a woman, this doesn't mean that you automatically know how to write them. My, that's weird.

Here's the most important part of this entry. Women are just people. They are not mythical, they are not unknowable. They're just like everyone else, except they're craftier and they smell nicer.

Male writers everywhere, stop writing them like they're a three-headed Hydra!

Rage Writing

2010-07-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

Channeling strong emotions into writing has been done since the world began. As you'll discover, channeling rage or sadness into anything creative is rather difficult. When people feel emotionally compromised, usually they'd rather go punch something (or somebody) or drink something strongish. Sitting down at a computer and writing another chapter in Farewell Atlantis seems like the last thing you'd want to do. The hardest part is making yourself sit down do it.

Say you've had an incredibly frustrating day. Lets also say that your solution (or self-imposed therapy) involves some kind of writing, whether it be poetry, fan fiction or something else entirely more violent. If you're trying to write something other people will actually want to read, it's probably best not just to write MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER until your fingers bleed. It certainly feels nice, though. You could also channel your rage/anger/frustration into a violent murder story that involves you killing all of your coworkers, but that's the kind of thing the FBI regards as suspicious.

Ahem.

It's probably best if you try to use your newfound emotional power for good instead of evil. It's kinda like a super power, actually. A super powers that is actually rather common. Your secret power, however, is that you know how to use it.

Assuming you're focusing on a particular person (whom you're angry at) or an emotion (directed at the person you're angry at), that's probably what's going to come out of your writing. It's a little bit like catching lightning in a bottle; if you do it right, it's amazing. If you do it wrong then you'll die (your mileage may vary).

Be prepared to clean up a lot of things. I find that I write more than I need when writing from an emotional place, and so many things end up getting deleted. As always, however, it's better to write too much than too little.

Another benefit of writing angry is that you'll almost never be bored. Everyone has had those days where they sit down at the keyboard and stare at a blank screen (or notebook) and think, “I can't write today.” When you're angry, the reaction is more akin to “LETS WRITE A BATTLE SCENE!” or “AVALANCHE ON A SKI SLOPE!”

If you find that you're still unable to write anything with a semblance of a story, you can at least try to write down character descriptions or story ideas. Sketch the aspects of the person you're mad at with broad character strokes. Maybe you can narrow down the things you're mad at and distill him down to pure evil. Who knows, you might have just made the next Great Villain™.