Writing Wednesday
Sorry for the silence last week, I just started a new job. It’s gonna be a full-time gig, so I’m still working out the logistics of when I’ll be able to make posts here during the day.
That said, I wanted to use this post to sort of address the very problem I’m now experiencing. See, before I was either unemployed or only employed part-time, and had all sorts of opportunities to write (many of which were squandered). Now? Now by the time I get home my Vyvanse is on its last legs and I’m tired and I don’t give a fuck about my characters and their lives and I just wanna have a beer, watch some Kamen Rider, and maybe spend some time with the girlfriend.
This of course just won’t do. I want to actually FINISH my novel, and I’ve got a writing contest coming up soon too. Just because I’m gainfully employed doesn’t mean I should let myself get complacent and give up on what I really want to do.
Sure, I could write on weekends, but I’ve got myself set up on a specific schedule with my Vyvanse, and I don’t take it on weekends. I have a lot of trouble writing anything significant -with0ut- the Vyvanse, and I don’t feel I can adequately do my job without it either so changing my schedule there doesn’t work. THANKFULLY, once my training is over at this job, I’ll have Mondays off (I’ll be working Saturdays though :/). What I’m going to try is keeping my Vyvanse schedule to Monday-Friday, and hope that Saturdays at work are doable without it. This way I can spend Monday writing and editing and doing all the stuff I love while the people I love are all at work.
However, until then I still need a solution. My current idea? Well, I live close to where I’m working so it’s not impossible, or even difficult for me to come home on my lunch breaks. So that’s what I’ll do, a couple of times a week. I’ll come home, write as much as I can before I have to go back to work, and when I get home hopefully I’ll have built up some steam while on lunch. I could also just bring my laptop with me to work and write there if I want to save the gas. I may use this alternative once I move into my normal shift.
This all comes back to my post on finding the time to write, way back in like…what, August? But what also comes into play, that I hadn’t considered at the time, is working out your priorities. With my now-limited time, I need to decide what projects and activities are most important to me, and assign them their own timeslots of a sort. This may not seem like news to a lot of you, but for me? FUCKIN REVOLUTIONARY. I’ve never worked a full 40 hour a week job before, so this will be a whole new adventure. I’m sure I can handle it, though, and I’m sure anyone reading this can handle their own time management solutions as well.
Minis Monday
Been awhile, champs. Minis Monday is one of those things I don’t have much to write about on a weekly basis. I could talk about what I’m doing, post some progress pics and whatnot, but that would require so many more steps than I really feel like taking that I just…don’t. I get most of my Minis discussion out of my system with Fearless Games and Touching Base, so you guys here at Coming Up Cypress do get a bit shafted.
ON TO TODAYS TOPIC: Painting fatigue.
I don’t know if there’s a legitimate name for it, but what I call painting fatigue is that feeling you get when you’ve painted a whole bunch of minis in the same color scheme and you just don’t want to do it anymore but your army isn’t done yet and just looking at your unpainted minis makes you tired. That’s painting fatigue. I’m currently experiencing painting fatigue with my Blood Angels for Fearless Games’ Legends of War. Twenty of the twenty eight minis in the army are supposed to be alabaster white, and painting white isn’t exactly a party. After painting fifteen of them, I literally wanted to just throw the army in the trash and call it a day because I don’t want to paint anymore white minis. Then I actually FORCIBLY FORGOT about the last five minis I need to paint in white. When I remembered, I felt sad.
When this happens, you have two choices. One is to give up and not finish the project and probably regret it later. The other is to stop whatever it is you’re currently doing and paint whatever is most different from what’s got you fatigued. Sick of painting troops? Paint a tank or a dreadnought or some other vehicle. Sick of painting vehicles? Paint troops. Sick of painting one color? Paint whatever in your army can be a different color. Can’t do any of these because your army list is too restrictive? Start that other army you’ve wanted to do, but make it radically different from what you’re doing now.
Monotony is like poison for the human brain. It makes us unhappy, and makes us sloppy. If you keep painting the same thing over and over to the point where you don’t like doing it, your paint job is going to suffer. My last Death Company looks MUCH different from my first Sanguinary Guard, because by the time I was painting that mini I was just SO done with white. So, I let myself take a break instead of trying to muscle through the last 5 white minis. I painted my Vanguard Veterans, which are very much red. I loved painting them, and they came out beautifully. Next I’m going to paint my Furioso Dreadnought. This way, not only am I separated from painting white, I’m separated from painting troops. Then, when I go back to my last five Sanguinary Guard, I’ll be rested and ready to tackle the white. After that I’ll reward myself by painting my Sanguinor.
With any luck, this approach will get me through the last stretch of this army and I’ll finally have one finished.
Writing Wednesday
Missed Toku Tuesday this week. Oops.
BUT I WILL MAKE WRITING WEDNESDAY AWWWW YEAH
Lately I’ve been having trouble writing some of the fluff for a tabletop game I’m developing with the other guys over at Fearless Games. The story of the setting is my department, and I want to make this bad boy shine as brightly as I can. I’ve gotten a timeline down, I’ve got some great ideas, hell I’ve even started developing ANOTHER game set in a different part of the timeline in this same setting – that’s how excited I am for this world.
I’ve posted about world building before here on Coming Up Cypress. It can be a very rewarding process, and often the world will build itself after a certain point. The problem I’m having? I’ve hung myself up on a minute detail: the name of the damn place.
Tolkien had Middle Earth, Gygax had Greyhawke, Guild Wars 2 has Tyria. In real life we have Earth. That’s where I’m hung up. How do I name an entire setting – a planet or dimension or plane – without it sounding…generic or clumsy? This is my ultimate dilemma. I could use real-world languages, build from there, but one of the things I’ve stressed about the games we’re developing is to avoid specific real-world cultural references as often as possible. We have warriors based on samurai, but I don’t want to CALL them samurai. It just feels convoluted.
What I’m doing is project suicide. I’m letting one minor problem halt all progress. This is something every writer will do at some point, and it’s something we must all learn to overcome because it’s impossible to avoid. At some point in all of your projects, you’re going to look at the page and go, “Well, shit. How can I progress without knowing what Dudebro Meatsack had for lunch last week? THE WORLD HANGS IN THE DAMN BALANCE.”
I need to push myself to move forward on this project. I need to hang up the world naming and keep going with the world building. I need to name countries and people and events. I need to work on other things. Hell, maybe I’ll find the name of this world somewhere in that process. Just like you’ll figure out what Dudebro likes to eat for lunch by writing about him more. You and I…we can even just come up with something for now and then go back…and change it. That’s the great thing about the writing process – if you aren’t pleased with your world, you are its god. You can literally go back in time and change what Dudebro ate. You can change Dudebro’s NAME. You can even make Dudebro into Babesis.
It’s sort of like when you’re in a heated argument that just isn’t going anywhere. You’re getting needlessly upset, but you just can’t seem to walk away. You need to walk away from it, though, or it’ll never get resolved because you’ll never think about it clearly. The more you hammer your face into that wall, the more clouded your judgement will become until eventually you don’t even know what a wall is and you’ll need to check your license to even remember your name. Learning to let go is important in life, and it’s important in writing.
So for now…I’m going to call the setting Jangha. I don’t love it, and it’s not going to be the final name…but it works for now. And that’s the best I can ask for.
Writing Wednesday
Last night, I was working on my novel when something happened that I hadn’t planned or expected. I sat there, reading and rereading what I’d just written, trying to figure out just what the fuck had just happened. I was probably more confused that the main character was about the situation. I’ve written things differently than planned in the past, but nothing has ever come out of left field like this has.
In the end, I decided to just go with it.
And that’s what I want you to do, too. Just go with it. If you surprise yourself, don’t go and change it because it doesn’t hold to your outline, however detailed it may be. The creative process is both creative and a process, and as a result is prone to growing and changing in its own unique ways. Holding it to some preordained notion of what’s “supposed” to happen is only going to make your work boring, both for you and the reader. You’re not writing a technical manual.
See, writing doesn’t just come from the brain. It comes from what’s around you, who’s around you, and what’s going on in your life. Your values will inevitably come through at some point while you write, be it in a side character or the central plot. You might even make cheeky hidden references to thinks you like, Easter eggs for any reader who likes the same things. You might not even notice you’ve DONE it until you’re reading over your first draft, or even after it’s been published. But it’ll happen.
Sometimes it will happen more directly than that, though. You’ll have a bad month at your day job, or you’ll be having some back problems, and suddenly your main character’s boss is kind of cranky or he suffers a back injury.
What specifically happened to me? A character I hadn’t intended on being in more than a scene or two literally trapped the main character into a quite uncharacteristic date for coffee. This side character has literally invited herself into the book on a greater scale than she was intended for, and she brought a potential romance subplot with her. I won’t say she’s an unwanted house guest, but she IS an unexpected one. Thankfully, she’s a real hoot to write, and I think the main character needs this kind of thing to happen. He needs a bit more humanity, and this just might be one way to do it.
And if I really can’t stand her or what she brings to the story? I’ll just fucking kill her.
Minis Monday
So it’s time for another Minis Monday. This segment is the one I post the least often, mostly because I get a lot of my miniatures discussion out over at the Fearless Games channel. However, now and again I decide that I wanna write it down, so that’s a-what I’m doing.
Remember, if you came here from the Fearless Games Facebook page, THIS BLOG IS MY PERSONAL BLOG. ANYTHING I SAY HERE IS SOLELY ME, AND DOES NOT REFLECT THE OPINIONS OR BEHAVIOR OF THE FEARLESS GAMES GROUP. I OFTEN CENSOR MY LANGUAGE FOR FEARLESS GAMES, BUT HERE I DON’T. IF YOU DON’T LIKE THAT, THEN PLEASE DON’T READ ON.
Now that we have that shit out of the way, I wanted to discuss the importance of basing you damn models. Now I’m not gonna lie – up until recently, I never saw the point and frankly didn’t give a shit about basing. It felt like a lot of extra work just for the sake of cosmetics, and that didn’t mesh with me at the time.
It didn’t mesh because I was lazy and my ADD wasn’t being treated and I thought I’d do a bad job because I thought I was bad at everything. SEE SOME OF THIS BLOG’S EARLY POSTS FOR SOME OF THAT INSECURE BULLSHIT.
I recently based my first squad of minis, specifically my Sanguinary Guard for the Blood Angels army I’m making for the Legends of War thing we’re doing at Fearless Games. I used some Fine Basing Grit by a company called Hobby Round, I think. It’s basically fat sand. Anyway, I’m not going to get into the how-to, because that’s something you can find EASILY. Might do a video on it for Fearless Games, dunno yet. AAAANYWAY, the point is that when I was done, the minis went from being cool-looking miniatures, to a finished fucking product. It hadn’t been NECESSARY, but it brought that extra bit of flair to the models that hadn’t been there.
And I didn’t do anything fancy. I’m serious. They’re dirt based. My miniatures look like they’re standing on dirt. No water, no grass, no rocks, just some fuckin DIRT. And it looks REALLY DAMN GOOD. And it was then that I realized that while basing isn’t NECESSARY, it’s very damn important. Would you hang a really nice painting on your wall without a frame? Sure, you could, but it just wouldn’t look as nice. It’d look like you half-assed it, or like you’re in a thrown-together apartment. Throw even a cheap, simple frame around that shit and suddenly you’re in the fuckin GUGGENHEIM, man.
Seriously. Sometimes that extra mile is really important to making your minis shine. And it doesn’t take long. Hell, you can make it look like you based your minis by PAINTING FUCKING STREET LINES ON THE ALREADY BLACK BASES. Literally just paint some lines. Yeah, that doesn’t work in ALL terrains, but that doesn’t matter. The basing is more about having a finished product than a versatile all-terrain look. It’s the same for my dirt bases. They’ll look silly in ice terrain or urban terrain, but my opponent will appreciate that I’ve gone that extra mile to add a LITTLE immersion, even if that immersion isn’t constant.
Just some food for thought.
Writing Wednesday
If you know me, you know I like to play the occasional video game. If you don’t know me, now you know I like to play the occasional video game. What the hell has this got to do with Writer Wednesday? I’ll TELL you what it’s got to do with Writer Wednesday!
Red Dead Redemption. (SPOILERS FOR THIS GAME FOLLOW, GO PLAY IT IF YOU INTEND TO)
Red Dead Redemption is one of those games that LOOKS like it’s just going to be a mindless fun shoot-em-up, but ends up being one of the rare shining examples of what video game storytelling COULD and SHOULD be (and WOULD be if the industry as a whole could get its head out of its ass). Red Dead Redemption (henceforth RDR for convenience) is the story of a man named John Marston, set in the turn of the 20th century (that’s around the 1890’s-1900’s for you uneducated folk). John used to be a member of a fairly nasty Old West cowboy gang – you know, the bandana-over-the-mouth, stick-em-up, tie-women-to-train-tracks types. Thing is, John eventually found himself a good woman, got hitched, had a kid, and got the HELL out of “the life”.
Until the FBI came calling, that is. They gave him a choice – go take out the last remaining members of your old crew, or we’ll put you in jail you monster. SO, John takes the only choice he’s really got and thus the adventure starts. The rest of the game puts John into some really awful scenarios he never asked for, all in the name of tracking down the men he used to call brother so he can return to the people he calls wife and son. John is shown time and again (at least through cutscenes, if not player-driven actions) to be a decent man who just made some mistakes when he was young. He doesn’t whine or complain about his mistakes coming back to bite him in the ass, though he does get bitter and homesick now and again.
Eventually, John does make it home, and we’re treated for around an hour of gameplay just doing…stuff at home. Scaring birds away from the crops, teaching John’s son Jack to ride a horse and shoot a gun, helping the neighbors get some new cattle, shit like that. It’s all very Harvest Moon and honestly, when you’re playing it for the first time, is also kind of jarring and almost BORING. Shouldn’t the game have ended when John gets home? It’s all very sweet.
Until the FBI shows up again. But this time, they brought the army. And after a violent shootout in which John’s old farmhand gets killed, John sends his wife and son off on his trusty horse (the one that brought him through all the bullshit of the rest of the game), and after a deep breath, steps out into the open to meet the enemy head on.
You’re given a moment to try and take out as many of them as you can.
It’s not enough.
And John Marston gets gunned the fuck down.
This was one of the greatest moments in video games for me. I’ve played a bunch, but I never had such a gut, emotional reaction before this moment, aside maybe from when I got my first Pokemon. This man, who has been through so much for his family, gets a handful of days with them (which seems SO BRIEF from a player perspective) before the men who forced him into leaving them to begin with double cross him and put him in the ground. It was heart wrenching. It was almost like the first fifteen minutes of Up.
So why the hell am I talking about RDR? Because it used a tool that we should all be using as writers if we want our readers to care about our characters. It used everyday life. It took us out of the action of John Marston the outlaw, and put us into the doldrums of the day-to-day for John Marston the farmer. Not only did we let out guard down, we finally got to really connect with the guy. Sure, some of us might have connected earlier – military family men come to mind – but for the rest of us, it was more of a vague connection, more of a “I can feel for the guy” than a “I know exactly what he’s going through.” Then we’re given the normalcy, and we can finally be one with him. “I know what it’s like trying to teach my son” or “I know what it’s like keeping an employee from slacking off” or “I know what it’s like trying to protect my home from vermin” are all everyday things that most of us can connect with.
And then we get to see all that come crashing down around him. We get to experience his dream shattered. And we start to compose our own feelings. We take his situation and make it our own. What if this had happened to me? Would I be brave enough to step out of that barn? Oh god, he’s lost everything. It’s a NIGHTMARE.
The same thing can happen when reading. It’s why George R.R. Martin puts so much detail into non-combative situations, why we get so much time with his characters at meals and in bed and behind closed doors when they’re not just playing the fucking Game of Thrones. It’s all so that when the Red Wedding hits, we want to cry and flush the book down the damn toilet, but we keep reading anyway because WHAT THE HELL HAPPENS NEXT.
Take some time away from the major plots and story arcs. Away from the combat, from the drama. Have your main character sit with a cup of tea and read the paper. Have your antagonist grab a beer with some old college buddies. You’ll be surprised what you might come out with – it might just be important characterization, and it might just make your book, story, or whateverthefuck that much sweeter.
Writing Wednesday
Weeks go by pretty damn quickly, and I find myself grasping for straws on what to post for each week’s Writing Wednesday. Keeping things fresh can be difficult, and that goes for prose, poetry, non fiction, and blogging all alike.
One of the best ways to stay fresh, however, is to keep practicing. This is actually somewhat of an extension of my post about writing for yourself versus writing for others, but what I’m discussing here is the idea of the writing exercise. You’re not doing it to add to your novel, or to your anthology, or your biography, or whatever project you’ve got going because presumably, if you’re in the boat I’m in right in this moment, you’re having trouble keeping it snappy, keeping it interesting, keeping it Zest-fully clean.
Any of you that have had any formal education in writing (taking a class to fill out some credits in college counts) are probably familiar with what I mean. Most teachers will assign a series of short assignments in the beginning of a semester, assignments that are essentially little writing prompts, but with limitations. Write about a gun without using the words gun, firearm, or even WEAPON. Oh, and you’ve got 500 words. Write about your favorite food, or smell, or song, but from the perspective of someone who hates it.
These sort of exercises are important because they force you to think outside of your own head. You have to not just step out of the box, but step out of yourself, out of a world where you can just say ‘gun’ and everyone knows what the fuck you’re talking about, out of your own world where you don’t understand how someone could hate pizza without being a filthy communist pig. You need to consider a thing, or a concept, for what it is as a whole. You need to consider how it works, what it’s made of, where it comes from. You have to come at it from every angle, and then a lot of the time compress that down to fit within a certain word limit. You’re not only testing how well you can analyze something, you’re testing how well you can summarize that analysis to it’s very essentials. It’s about being broad and succinct all in the same exercise and sometimes these things can be fucking brutal.
Other exercises include prompts to write a story that includes a really obscure word, like ‘abaft’ or ‘doppio’, somewhere in the text. Sometimes that word needs to be important to the story, sometimes not. Either way, finding a place to put that word can be difficult without feeling like it’s been shoehorned in. Sometimes that one word will change the entire setting or who the characters are. Sometimes it will determine the presence of a side character or a piece of dialogue.
The point of these exercises is the same as any other exercise. You need to keep your craft well-trained in order to use it properly. If you’re having trouble lifting something, you spend a little more time on the bench press until you no longer have a problem. If you can’t figure out the best way to phrase a sentence, there’s no shame in spending a little time on the side working out your craft.
One thing I used to do (and should probably start doing again) is exercise my writing in text messages. I would send one friend or another as complete a story or description of an object (without using any words related to that object) as I could in a single text message. It was a fun challenge, and my friends’ reactions were usually pretty funny. A few of these, and I was usually ready to tackle my REAL project, with a renewed vigor and thirst for getting it done. Give it a try sometime.
What’s this? Two posts in one day?
Hey guys. I haven’t give those of you who read this thing an update on my personal life in weeks, so I figure now’s as good a time as any.
I had my 28th birthday this past weekend, and I gotta say it was the best yet. A week or two beforehand I was starting to worry about it. I worried that it would be shitty, that it wouldn’t go the way I wanted it to, that nobody really wanted to spend my birthday with me because fuck me that’s why. Thankfully, I was able to sublimate all of that nonsense in time for the day itself, and I had a really wonderful time. Dinner with my girlfriend followed by a great time just dickin’ around with friends at my house was exactly what I needed, and while some people might wonder why I didn’t do something more grandiose, the people who know me understand that as much as I love things like Six Flags and big fun day trips, for my birthday I’m content just to have the company of people who think I’m cool.
I’ve been in therapy about a month or so now, and a couple of weeks were rocky there, and I’m sure further weeks were rocky, but I can already tell that I’m getting better. I’m far from perfect, and I doubt I’ll ever -be- perfect, but I’m slowly becoming ME again, and I’m confident that I will one day be me. I may need to be in therapy for the rest of my days, I may not, but it’s a price I’d be willing to pay to keep the things that I have, as well as gain so much more.
I think the reason I’m posting this is because a friend of mine on Facebook posted a status about how she doesn’t want people to celebrate or mention her birthday. Having been there, I posted the following:
“There were some years that I felt this way, and to an extent I do still feel this way. I’m 28 now, and I don’t have more than a couple hundred bucks in the bank, I’m unemployed and living with my parents, slowly eating myself into an early grave. I’m the son they wished they hadn’t raised, or at least that’s what my mind tells me.
But then, if I’m such a failure of a human being, why do they keep me around? Why do my friends return my calls? Why am I with a girl who’s so clearly too damn good for me?
It doesn’t suit to focus on things yet undone, just as much as it’s bad to live in the past of things you cannot change. The fact of the matter is that you’re not a machine, and so you cannot be held to one universal standard of performance. Some of us take a little longer to get off the runway than others, and that’s perfectly okay because that’s just how people are.
I’m actually kind of taken aback by this status because even though you and I don’t know each other too well – we met maybe once or twice and a Hofstra Writer’s Club meeting – I have to admit that I kind of admire you. You’ve got a certain intensity about you, and you’re incredible talented. I actually had a bit of a crush on you for a while, if I’m being completely honest.
So what I’m getting at is that you might not be satisfied with where you’re at, but that’s no reason not to celebrate being there. Hell, if you don’t want to celebrate your birthday itself, then celebrate the things you DO like about your life – your friends, your family, whatever it is that keeps you going and makes each day worth living. Because even though YOU don’t think you’re worth celebrating, the people who love you absolutely disagree.”
I’m not going to share her name, or exactly what she posted, but sharing my response is my own call so please none of the OMG FACEBOOK NEEDS TO BE PRIVATE silliness that comes from mentioning social networking on any level.
A month ago I wouldn’t have posted anything. Two weeks ago I might not have posted anything more than “chin up, kiddo”. Today, I decided that I couldn’t stand by and just let something like that slide – not when I might be able to help. I barely know this person, but I know the pain she’s going through. I know what it’s like to feel worthless. And I know what it’s like trying to FIGHT that feeling. It’s hard to do, and near impossible to do alone. I don’t mean alone in the romantic sense, either. It might have taken nearly losing the woman I love to get my to finally make this journey, but I don’t need her specifically to do it. I DO need my doctor and my friends though. I need PEOPLE. We all do, really. I’m glad as hell that I DO have my girlfriend with me on this, I thank my luckiest fucking stars, but I finally know that I don’t need her to be happy. I don’t need her to live. I was here before her, and as much as I want for us to work out and maybe even one day wear rings for one another, I will be here after her if it doesn’t go as well as I’d like.
I used to focus too hard on being with someone romantically. It used to be my validation. I still fight with that part of my psyche sometimes, finding myself thinking that she’s my entire world, that everything would suck without her. But those thoughts are more easily chased away now, and I know that one day I won’t even have them, because I know where they come from now. I know that these thoughts aren’t mine – not really, at least. They come from an outside source, one that I took too seriously and misinterpreted. They live in a part of me that is weak and wounded and has been avoiding the healing process because it’s just too hard. Relying on other people is easy, and if you chase people away? There’s about 6 billion more out there to rely on, to take advantage of. I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to lift people up, in the same way they’ve lifted me up all my life. I want to stand on my own as often as I can. I know there will be times that I need to lean on someone. I want to save the leaning for those times.
It’s going to be a long, hard journey, and I’m going to hate a lot of it. But it’s going to be worth it, as it already has been.
I probably won’t post this one to Facebook or anything. People check my blog now and again I’m sure, and these posts aren’t necessarily for public consumption. Maybe I’ll show the link to a few people here and there, who knows. What I do know is that I need to be writing other things right now, so for the nonce, I’m out.
Writing Wednesday
So I just finished editing another novel for Hydra Publications. Once it gets released, I’ll put some links here for people to take a look, maybe buy it, whatever. It was real damn good, I actually think people would like it.
Anyway, the reason I mention my completed project is because there was something about this novel in particular that you don’t always see in fiction, and something that a lot of writers have trouble with. That ‘thing’ is being true to your characters. Now, I don’t mean not cheating on them, or not lying to them – treat them like shit if you gotta – but rather being true to what they are. If you’re writing a novel, and the main character is a thirty-year-old Jewish investment banker, even if that investment banker discovers that he’s the goddamn Batman, you need to remember that he has roots. He comes from a certain background, and has become a certain person. Discovering superpowers does not change who you are. It may change how much of yourself you SHOW people, but that’s something I’m going to get to in a moment.
We’re all formed by our experiences. I’m not going to get psychological on you all, here, because it’s not a field I’m an expert at. There are studies out there that theorize exactly WHEN our core personalities are formed, but they all seem to agree that it’s fairly early in life. And the more I think about it, the more I tend to agree with that concept. I’m about to turn 28 years old, and I’m a self-sacrificing, self-doubting, caring, nurturing, violently angry bastard of a man. And I was a self-sacrificing, self-doubting, caring, nurturing, violently angry bastard of a kid. The first time I punched a dude over literally nothing was in…preschool. We were all playing house and I was dead-set on playing the role of “Daddy”, but this motherfucker insisted that HE would be “Daddy” and that…that just wasn’t gonna fly.
BUT THATS A STORY FOR ANOTHER DAY
My point is that characters, when written properly, are people. People behave in certain ways at certain points in their lives, pretty much across the board. Children are curious and adventurous, but startle easy like Tusken Raiders and Goblins. Teenagers are reckless and horny and moody, and constantly misunderstand each other like all the characters in Kamen Rider 555 (Faiz, for you uninitiated folk). Adults are like teenagers, but they hide it better. Regardless of all these human similarities, everyone is different in their own unique ways. I’m all the things I listed before, but my best friend is nothing like me. He’s an inspiring, escapist, brilliant, overly logical prick, and we get along swimmingly because we can see past the differences to what things we DO share.
Now here’s where I’m getting to the part I promised two paragraphs ago. Some people hide who they are. They wear a mask of sorts, to be cliche about it, to make people believe that they’re someone they aren’t. I did this in college to an extent, and everyone does this a little bit every day. It’s dangerous to wear your heart on your sleeve. Some people take that to a much greater extent, and you don’t get to see who they really are until they trust you enough to let that mask crack a bit behind closed doors. The point is, this is an entirely viable way to write a character, especially if you want to liberate them from their false nature over the course of your story, but if you want this facade to be a major part of the plot or that character’s development, the reader needs to be aware of it before you pull the mask aside.
It’s easy to have mild-mannered Clark Kent suddenly start beating in heads after discovering his alien superpowers, and then answer the quite-understandable questions of “wait what the hell” with “he was always like that, he just hid it from the world”. But as a writer, what’s easy is very rarely what’s right. If Clark’s got a mean streak in him, you need to hint at it, to give the reader just a little taste, because when you finally open those floodgates, the attentive reader will have been on the edge of their seat waiting for it, and the inattentive reader can be pointed to all the times you dropped those hints when they ask you “what the hell”. A really good example of this is in Wanted – the comic book version, not the movie version. The main character is painted to be such a pansy-ass, but even from the beginning, he expressed a certain feeling of discontent. He didn’t feel like himself, didn’t love his life as it was. This was enough to make the absolute 180 degree personality shift he goes through justifiable – there was always a little bit of asshole in there that he just didn’t want to let out.
Sometimes this kind of thing is done through self-discovery, especially with younger characters. A character will find, through the course of the story, that there’s an aspect of their personality that they’d never expressed, or never acknowledged, but was there from the start in small ways. A character that discovers her boldness might make a small stand in the first chapter, only to be making a grand stand on the battlements in the last chapter and realizing “oh hey, I’m kind of a badass”. On the flip side, a character who discovers his cruelty probably starts with a sharp tongue in the first chapter, only to find himself with a sharp knife in the last.
Veracity is key in writing. Even when trying to mislead your reader and your characters, it all needs to come together in the end and make sense. If you ignore the nature of your characters, of your world, and are untrue to them, then veracity is lost and you’re just moving chess pieces through a series of events you thought was cool. It becomes your own personal power fantasy, where you mold every moment to suit what makes you happiest. That makes for a good time, sure, but it doesn’t make for a good story. Writing isn’t all about you, though. Not really.
Writing Wednesday
If you’re a writer, and you’re like me, you have an absolute treasure trove of ideas swimming around up in that melon of yours, all just waiting to be vomited up onto the page. Fiction ideas, nonfiction ideas, nonfiction-fiction fusion ideas, experimental literature ideas, hell even ideas for things that aren’t writing like films, music, paintings, anything!
When it comes to generating ideas, I’m pretty much always on. Right now I have three novel ideas in various states of completion, with three more sitting on the drawing board, as well as two comic book projects, both waiting for me to give them some attention. I’ve got ideas for films – long AND short – as well as musical projects (Keep an eye out for Rockelele, coming to your ears GOD KNOWS WHEN LOL). I draw sometimes, I paint sometimes, and I constantly have ideas for both.
If you’re NOT like me, you’re probably getting jealous. Some people have trouble with ideas, so when they meet an idea guy, as it were, they get all torches-and-pitchforks. Well, fuck you I say, because sometimes having so many ideas blows every single dick on the block and some from the next block over. Especially if you ALSO have ADD (or ADHD), then you’re just this whirlwind of cool ideas and zero productivity.
And that’s just the problem with having so many ideas – there is a such thing as TOO MANY ideas. I think most writers have at least a little ADD, in that we get excited for cool new ideas and cool new projects. You’re working on that novel, that story, that article, or whatever, and suddenly INSPIRATION FUCKING HITS and now you really want to give this new idea some more attention because it’s the cool new shiny toy and it’s just so much more alluring than the CURRENT project because the current project is at the “hard part” stage of actually fucking writing it.
That’s when you need to sit down and figure out which one is a better idea. Not just by quality of premise, but by compatibility with you as a writer, as well as compatibility with your wallet. When I say compatibility with you as a writer, I mean that every writer has their limitations, every writer has their style and process and voice, and just like in the music industry not every voice is fit to sing every song. You don’t give O Fortuna to Cher in the same way that you don’t give Gangnam Style to a choir boy (you also don’t give Gangnam Style to HYUNA – she’s cute, but she really just shits all over it). If you write like Warren Ellis, you’re probably not going to have the best time working on that sappy romance novel, and if you write like Danielle Steele it might be best to take a step back from that gritty noir detective piece.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t push your limits. It’s always good to try new things, don’t get me wrong, but save the experimental ideas for when you don’t have other things on your plate. Because if it doesn’t work out, or you end up hating it, then your wallet might end up a little bit light. And by that I mean if you’re trying to make a living writing, you absolutely have to consider which ideas might net you the most beneficial returns within the timeframe you need them to. Tooling out that new genre piece you’ve never tried before might be the best thing that ever happened to your craft, but you have to be able to eat while you do it.
It comes down to a combination of impulse control and self-awareness. As a writer, you need to take the time to sit down with every idea as it comes, assess it, and either jot it down for later or get started on it based on how viable it may or may not be. Sometimes an idea shouts at you to get it done. It won’t let you sleep, it won’t let you work. But if that idea is no good for you, it’s not worth buckling to the pressure just because the better ideas are being more polite.
Writing Wednesday
Write something that you’re never going to publish. Write something that you’re never going to submit for a grade, or for editing, or for any sort of critique or peer review of any kind. You can show this something to other people if you want, but make sure that they understand that you didn’t write it for critique or review or for anyone else’s approval.
You are writing this thing entirely for yourself. An audience of one.
It doesn’t have to be long – a few hundred words, if that’s all you really want to write. I’m not asking you to invest the time it would take to write a novel that you’ll never show anyone else, that would be ludicrous. If you WANT to write a novel that you’ll never show anyone else, god fucking speed.
The reason I’m asking you to do this is because writing something without the intent of someone reading it at the end of the day does two very healthy things: 1) It helps you blow off steam. It gives you the freedom to write anything you want – you want a shotgun blast to knock down a building, then that building is toast. You want the main character, who is typically a sheepish and polite librarian, to call someone a cunting asshole gobshite, well then she just said that shit and it was the sickest burn of all time. You can get this kind of tomfoolery out of your system, and that helps you stay on point when you’re writing ‘for real’. 2) It helps you develop your literary voice. Too many times a writer will be trying to emulate someone that they admire all throughout their work, and it more often than not comes across as a cheap knockoff, as something derivative and shallow. Instead, what most writers want to do is to internalize those things they like most about their favorite authors. Writing for yourself allows you to digest these things, and rather than just regurgitate what you THINK they are, you can make them a part of yourself. Instead of being homage at best and derivative at worst, your work can be reminiscent.
Both of these things are of crucial importance to any writer, casual or serious. Bottling yourself up can cause some seriously debilitating writer’s block. I’ve gone weeks without writing all because I wished the main character could just shoot the bad guy’s dick off and call it a day. So I opened a new file, and as if writing for an alternate universe, made that shit happen and it was goddamn awesome. Having a poorly developed voice will get you lost in the sea of work that’s out there. When you think about your favorite author – I don’t care if it’s Hemingway or Tolkien or Bendis – you can immediately think of things that are them. Certain stylistic choices they make, certain words they love to use. Things they seem to have a really firm grasp on. Writing for yourself can help you develop those choices that you’ll be making, and it’s the kind of thing that I can’t even properly give you an example of, because if you’re reading my work and recognizing certain things that I like to do a lot – for example, I kinda like italics sometimes and I find the occasional intentional run-on sentence super hilarious because it reminds me of when someone is trying to explain something quickly in a conversation that they’re super excited about so they can’t get their head on entirely straight to make a concise statement about why this or that thing is simply the coolest.
Doesn’t have to be long. Doesn’t have to be good. Just needs to be yours.
There are millions of ways to go about doing something like this. I usually write alternate dimensional versions of my current works in progress (where the good guy can shoot peoples’ dicks off!). Sometimes I show what I wrote to certain friends who will probably find it hilarious, but other times I write something that’s either too personal, too offensive, or just so god awful that I squirrel it away and make it my little secret happy accident. Some people use their blogs for this sort of thing.
Until next week, you cunting asshole gobshites!
Looking Behind to Look Ahead
So I’m sitting at my computer, reading the Internet in its entirety, and I find myself thinking more and more about the solutions to my problems. In the past, I’ve typically done one of two things: 1) Run from my problems. If they catch up, run more. 2) Patchwork solutions. Sweep it under the rug and forget about it. Be genuinely surprised when someone uncovers it.
These are really shit solutions in that they aren’t solutions at all. They might have worked for me when I was younger – that isn’t to say I’m not still young, but an 18 year old can get away with more than a 27 year old in this regard – but if I keep this kind of behavior up, I’m going to find myself very lonely and very confused when I hit 50 and I’ve chase everyone off. I’m finally starting to recognize that my prideful “I can fix it on my own” attitude just isn’t cutting it, especially when I follow it with a “fix it by ignoring it” approach. This can be applied to pretty much every problem I’ve got.
I’m insecure. I’ve openly admitted that for a while now. What I didn’t do was try to fix it, not really. Instead I made it into a part of me, wove it into my identity. In the (paraphrased) words of Tyrion Lannister, I “wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt” me. Only that shit was doing me more harm than good. Much like when Speedball became Penance, my armor had super extreme spikes on the inside. My “armor” was just a torture device that I didn’t really tell anyone about. That’s not to say Tyrion’s advice is no good, but it’s the sort of advice that can be very easily twisted into an excuse to not fix an unhealthy aspect of yourself. I have to remember that he was referring to Jon Snow’s bastard birth, and his own stunted form – these were things that were out of the hands of the people in question. My insecurity isn’t out of my hands.
I’m also overweight. I am fat as hell. This has also been a long-standing problem, but it’s one of those problems that was actually kind of exacerbated by my insecurity. When I was 18, I weighed something like 200 pounds. I thought I was the fattest thing to ever fatty fat its chubby way out of the FatLands. I would kill you, your parents, your siblings, your extended family, your coworkers, your friends, and all but one of your children to be 200 pounds again. I would leave your one remaining child alive because I’m curious what he or she would do with his or her life. See, my insecurity led me to believe that the problem was so far gone that there was no point in fighting it, and I might as well just have 3 croissants for breakfast on my way to class because HEY, IM ALREADY MAD FAT, SCREW IT YOLO. 18-year-old me was a damn idiot, and anytime someone hits me with that super-cliche question of “if you had a time machine what would you do”, the answer is always, and I mean always “go back and slap the food out of my hand”. Whether or not I actually SAY that answer, it’s always the one I think of first. Now, there’s no point in living in the past, but I’m a firm believer in at least TRYING to learn from past mistakes, and part of learning from your mistakes is being able to analyze them. When I hit college, I completely self-destructed, and that self-destruct took the form of all the delicious food I could stuff into my dumb head. I continued to self-destruct until I nearly hit 300 pounds a couple of years ago. When my doctor told me that I was 290 pounds and approaching diabetes in a very real way, I knew I needed to turn my shit around and go back the way I came.
Thankfully, though my weight has fluctuated since then, I’ve not broken that 290 mark. I drew my line in the sand, and I haven’t crossed it. It might be one of the few promises to myself that I haven’t broken over the years. I’m currently back down into the 270’s range, and I’m trying real hard not to lose my grip on it.
It all comes back to my insecurity. My negative self-image exacerbates the problems that caused it in the first place. A nasty cycle that I’ve been too ashamed to admit is too big of a problem for me to handle on my own. Finally I’m admitting it, and while there’s a good deal of that pit you get in your stomach when you’re about to admit to wrondoing – like showing your parents a shitty report card or telling your girlfriend you cheated on her – I have to recognize that even though I did let it get out of hand, I didn’t necessarily do anything wrong. If I persecute myself, it’ll only make my recovery harder, and it IS a recovery process. It’s almost like an addiction. I’m addicted to feeling down on myself because it give my brain an excuse not to really try things. It’s easy to say “Oh I didn’t get that job because I’m just a shit person overall” than it is to say “Maybe I need to retool my resume or work on my interviewing skills. Maybe I need to get some more relevant experience elsewhere before looking for a job in that field”. It’s easier to just blame my problems on some inherent, intangible fact of my nature that somehow makes me inferior than it is to recognize that my problems – at least the ones that aren’t entirely external, like those caused by economic downturn or crappy weather – are because somewhere along the line I fucked up. Because it’s hard, especially for someone with my issues, to admit that I’m responsible for my own actions when things don’t go right. It’s hard to admit when I mess something up because I have so much trouble recognizing that it’s okay to mess up and it’s not the end of the world unless I accidentally gave nuclear codes to a crazy person.
I can become the man I’ve always wanted to be. I’m still young. I can lose weight, I can gain confidence, I can finish writing a damn novel and get that shit published and make all that delicious bestseller money. I know these things as facts, in the same way that I know that organic chemistry is the study of things made of fucking carbon. It’s intellectual, academic knowledge that I can’t refute, but haven’t grasped yet. What I need to do, and what I might need professional help in order to accomplish, is make it so I know those things as well as I know the fact that water is fucking wet and is mad tasty when it’s hot out. I gotta turn that shit from fringe science to common sense.
And no, organic chemistry doesn’t count as fringe science, but that shit is hard.
I’m gonna be a fucking helium balloon.
Coming up Cypress 
