I have to admit that this is a fairly "random" type of post, but I thought it needed to be said, because I just really noticed it for the first time today.
When I was younger (most of the way through my teens), I loved the fact that I could grow really long nails completely naturally. Where other girls had to go and get fake nails, I could just grow mine out, and quickly, too. The fact that I rarely had cause to paint them is another story entirely. This period of my life was also largely before I was introduced to the joys of the computer. It was, after all, only three years ago (maybe four) that I learned how to email people. I wish I was kidding, but I can clearly remember demanding that my mother teach me how to send email.
Anyway, then junior/senior year at high school happened. In between my junior and senior year of high school, I went to a pre-college summer program. Because they thought it would be a good idea, my parents shelled out the bucks to get me a laptop (the same laptop that I'm typing this up on, as a matter of fact). That was probably when I started using a computer for more than about five minutes a day, and the usage slowly increased up from there, to the point where I can easily spend quite a few hours sitting in front of it a day.
Typing is perfectly possible if you have long nails, just mighty uncomfortable, I've found. In that respect, it's kind of like playing a guitar (which I did, briefly, possess the ability to do). You can do it, but it's a hell of a lot easier to do it with short nails.
Why did I just come to terms with this?
Well, about two weeks ago, I was about to cut my nails when I remembered how much I enjoyed having long nails, even if I did nothing with them, and so I wanted to see if I could still grow them out. Five minutes ago, right before starting this post, I cut them. It's just so much easier to type, so much quicker, and my fingers slip so much less easily off the keys than fingernails. I'm a fast typist, and having fingernails slip off keys is a very real event for me.
So maybe it's unfeminine to have nails that are incredibly short. I'm not a very girly-girl anyway, I don't wear make-up, dresses, or skirts, and I don't paint my nails. Of course, there are things that long nails are good for: untying knots, changing the time on my watch, and the like.
Ah, well. C'est la vie. Can't have everything.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Extraneous this or THAT
So, over at fictionscribe, I offered up my first 200 words to be sliced and diced as they rightly deserved to be. I was amazed at the...tameness of the comments. Yes, I got rightly lambasted for my overuse of "THAT" and the fact THAT my second character's name remained unknown for the 200 words, and yes I've been writing the damn thing for years, but I express my surprise. As I had known more or less when it was going to be posted up there, I got into the habit of (even while at home over Easter) checking the blog as frequently as I could to see if she had posted and commented on it yet. As it turned out, no such luck until Monday, which was more or less what I had expected anyway. Still, it is always a pleasant surprise when you think you are throwing something to the wolves and instead of it being ripped to shreds, comes back with just a hole ripped in the knee of its faded jeans.
Anyway, as soon as I read the comments for the excerpt, I did as suggested, and went to my current version of the novel from hell, did a find and replace for the word "THAT", and came up with a staggering 305 "THAT"'s. I know some of them are probably useful - the word does exist for a reason, but 305/12,711 = (according to my calculator) 0.239 = 2.39%! Nearly 2.5% of my story is THAT. And THAT has given me something else to torture myself over. Not only do I have to WRITE the damned thing, I have to worry about my tragic overuse of a certain word. More than THAT, I have to worry about having another THAT word THAT takes up another 2.5%, or another, or another, to perpetuity. And THAT, ladies and gents, is why I have been working on this wreck of a novel for nearly 6 years. Yes, we must be coming up on the 6th within the next couple of months. Perhaps I should burn an old copy of it to celebrate (or hell, the new copy, for all the good it's doing sitting open on my computer right now...stop trying to make me feel guilty, damn it!)
In spite of the very good advice given to me in reducing my THAT's (and yes, it IS something THAT I will take notice of, in the editing stage), for the sake of my sanity, and it's fragile enough as it is, I'm just going to tuck it away in the back of my head and only bring it out when the novel from hell is back in an editing stage. Theoretically, THAT will happen around a month after the hell known as university concludes for the semester. Then I will spend the summer torturing myself with it, and have something to send out when I should be going to class next fall.
I recall THAT, when writing my hook for the last Miss Snark Crapometer, I noticed my extraneous use of THAT. I suspect it is a problem many people face without even knowing they do it (agree with me here for my sanity). However, in Russian (yep, I'm a dork learning Russian), you have to use the word THAT, you can't omit it as you can in English in many instances. So maybe it's just THAT has become such a filler word and we need to prune down on its use.
I just copied and posted this into MSWord and had it capitalize all my uses of the word THAT and it made me laugh to see how many of them there were.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Writing Advice - Characters
First, a disclaimer. I'm not published, so take anything I say with a heavy helping of salt. In the same vein, though, what works for one person doesn't always work for another, so even if I were published and famous (haha), the things I said were good wouldn't necessarily be good for everyone. I'm hesitant enough to post this anyway, because I feel it does sound a tad pretentious for someone that's simply a wannabe to tell others how they should be doing it.
But enough of that.
Characters, for me, tend to make or break a story. I can't care about a story if I can't care about the characters in it.
Characters aren't made, they just exist. I know that sounds bad, because you're going to say that they're fictional and so someone has to make them up. Yes, to a point. I have my main characters, Nicholas, Stephen, and the rest. But I didn't sit down and say "this is what they're like". Let me tell you what I DID do, way back when, to the extent that I can remember.
I didn't start out by saying Nicholas was going to be good/bad, kind/cruel, or any of it. I started with, I wanted him to be poor, a father with strong political opinions, and working for the government, and I think that's about the extent that I started with.
His PERSONALITY, wasn't something that I intentionally created. I just started writing stories about him. I still have most of them here on my laptop. They're not very good stories, but they helped to make him a character. He's a father, and he wants to be a good one. To be a good father, he feels that he needs to be able to feed and clothe his children. When he cannot do this well, enough, it makes him extremely frustrated. It makes him angry at the government that is denying him the money that he feels he is entitled to. What do people do when they're angry about a situation, or with a group of people? They want to change the situation, using whatever means possible. For Nicholas, this ultimately means going against the government.
You can't GIVE your characters a personality. Or rather, you can, but don't expect them to be believable or likeable or for them to be any more than cardboard cut-outs. They'll be patchwork quilts of the things that you wanted to make them. And what's worse, as you write more and more, it will become painfully obvious that they're NOT what you intended them to be. Because as you gain talent as a writer, these things just start to come naturally. So you'll be saying "Princess Fairydust is vain but self-confident" and what your story will show is that Princess Fairydust is actually neither vain nor self-confident, and then you lose your readers.
My characters all live in my head. Every last one of them, major and minor, the ones from the last rewrite and the ones that dropped out several rewrites ago. They're all still there, because they're all real people to me. I could imagine walking down the hall of my dorm and running into them. I wouldn't necessarily WANT to, but they're just as real to me as flesh-and-blood people are to me.
I don't just think about my characters when I'm writing. I think about them all the time. I could be in the store picking up some soup and suddenly think about something Nicholas or Stephen might say. Their lives are NOT restricted to the story that I write. They exist outside of it. They are bigger than the story.
The story exists because of them, they don't exist because of the story.
Major characters don't ever exist because of a story. A story exists because of the major characters. That's something else that you don't seem to get. Characters come first, a plot follows naturally after you've got characters. That's why I have about 20 short stories on my computer, none of which are even very relevant now, but all of which helped to create the personality of my characters. Once they're real people, certain plots just become self-evident and you couldn't force a plot on them any more than you could radically alter the direction of my life just by telling me so.
And yes, you might say there is a difference because I write with characters in "the real world" and if you're a fantasy writer. I say, that doesn't matter a whit. They still need to be real. I wrote a fantasy for Nano. I don't think that it's particularly good, but I still did it the same way that I started writing the novel-from-hell. I picked my main characters, gave them a sentence-long biography, and then started writing short stories about them.
Put characters in situations and find ways to get them out of them. That's how you "build their personality". Sure, other writers might have a better way of doing it. But what I do know is that just "giving" your characters qualities, is NOT going to work. It just isn't. It's not going to give you characters that anyone can relate to, that anyone can believe in.
But enough of that.
Characters, for me, tend to make or break a story. I can't care about a story if I can't care about the characters in it.
Characters aren't made, they just exist. I know that sounds bad, because you're going to say that they're fictional and so someone has to make them up. Yes, to a point. I have my main characters, Nicholas, Stephen, and the rest. But I didn't sit down and say "this is what they're like". Let me tell you what I DID do, way back when, to the extent that I can remember.
I didn't start out by saying Nicholas was going to be good/bad, kind/cruel, or any of it. I started with, I wanted him to be poor, a father with strong political opinions, and working for the government, and I think that's about the extent that I started with.
His PERSONALITY, wasn't something that I intentionally created. I just started writing stories about him. I still have most of them here on my laptop. They're not very good stories, but they helped to make him a character. He's a father, and he wants to be a good one. To be a good father, he feels that he needs to be able to feed and clothe his children. When he cannot do this well, enough, it makes him extremely frustrated. It makes him angry at the government that is denying him the money that he feels he is entitled to. What do people do when they're angry about a situation, or with a group of people? They want to change the situation, using whatever means possible. For Nicholas, this ultimately means going against the government.
You can't GIVE your characters a personality. Or rather, you can, but don't expect them to be believable or likeable or for them to be any more than cardboard cut-outs. They'll be patchwork quilts of the things that you wanted to make them. And what's worse, as you write more and more, it will become painfully obvious that they're NOT what you intended them to be. Because as you gain talent as a writer, these things just start to come naturally. So you'll be saying "Princess Fairydust is vain but self-confident" and what your story will show is that Princess Fairydust is actually neither vain nor self-confident, and then you lose your readers.
My characters all live in my head. Every last one of them, major and minor, the ones from the last rewrite and the ones that dropped out several rewrites ago. They're all still there, because they're all real people to me. I could imagine walking down the hall of my dorm and running into them. I wouldn't necessarily WANT to, but they're just as real to me as flesh-and-blood people are to me.
I don't just think about my characters when I'm writing. I think about them all the time. I could be in the store picking up some soup and suddenly think about something Nicholas or Stephen might say. Their lives are NOT restricted to the story that I write. They exist outside of it. They are bigger than the story.
The story exists because of them, they don't exist because of the story.
Major characters don't ever exist because of a story. A story exists because of the major characters. That's something else that you don't seem to get. Characters come first, a plot follows naturally after you've got characters. That's why I have about 20 short stories on my computer, none of which are even very relevant now, but all of which helped to create the personality of my characters. Once they're real people, certain plots just become self-evident and you couldn't force a plot on them any more than you could radically alter the direction of my life just by telling me so.
And yes, you might say there is a difference because I write with characters in "the real world" and if you're a fantasy writer. I say, that doesn't matter a whit. They still need to be real. I wrote a fantasy for Nano. I don't think that it's particularly good, but I still did it the same way that I started writing the novel-from-hell. I picked my main characters, gave them a sentence-long biography, and then started writing short stories about them.
Put characters in situations and find ways to get them out of them. That's how you "build their personality". Sure, other writers might have a better way of doing it. But what I do know is that just "giving" your characters qualities, is NOT going to work. It just isn't. It's not going to give you characters that anyone can relate to, that anyone can believe in.
Monday, April 2, 2007
The Idea, But...
Last November, during which I was a proud participant of NaNoWriMo, I started and aborted a story that was my first endeavor into the realm of literary fiction. I don't consider myself technically a good enough writer nor even truly a good enough storyteller to pull off something that is a lot less action-y than the stuff that I usually write. Yet, it was my one chance to put aside the wretched novel-from-hell and give something else a shot. So I made a lot of plans and I came up with a basic structure for it.
It flopped, miserably, about 10,000 words in. I could tell that it was boring...it wasn't going anywhere, and it wasn't even prettily not going anywhere. It was just lying there like a great lump on the ground and growling at me whenever I looked at it. All in all, it and I just weren't getting along. So I got my mop and mopped it up, tossed it in a folder of its own and hid it in the list of my writing failures, titled under My Document as "Graveyard".
There it has happily sat until last night, when I pulled out. Not the story itself, but the notes and the Excel spreadsheet I made for it.
Do you know the expression "the word's on the tip of my tongue"? Well, this is exactly the same thing. I feel like I'm just inches away from some epitome that will give me insight on how to write it, and how to write it so that its reincarnation is less like the growling lump. On my walk to the library this evening, I was even juggling some first lines in my mind. I feel like I've almost got it, but just like the frustration you feel when you can't think of that word, I feel the same about this concept, which I...just...can't...quite...get.
It flopped, miserably, about 10,000 words in. I could tell that it was boring...it wasn't going anywhere, and it wasn't even prettily not going anywhere. It was just lying there like a great lump on the ground and growling at me whenever I looked at it. All in all, it and I just weren't getting along. So I got my mop and mopped it up, tossed it in a folder of its own and hid it in the list of my writing failures, titled under My Document as "Graveyard".
There it has happily sat until last night, when I pulled out. Not the story itself, but the notes and the Excel spreadsheet I made for it.
Do you know the expression "the word's on the tip of my tongue"? Well, this is exactly the same thing. I feel like I'm just inches away from some epitome that will give me insight on how to write it, and how to write it so that its reincarnation is less like the growling lump. On my walk to the library this evening, I was even juggling some first lines in my mind. I feel like I've almost got it, but just like the frustration you feel when you can't think of that word, I feel the same about this concept, which I...just...can't...quite...get.
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