Category Archives: Writing

Writing

To Change With Purpose

As winter fully sets in and we crawl on towards springtime, I find myself reflective every year. In part it’s because my birthday is right in the middle of it, a moment where I have to acknowledge the passage of time and can’t help but take stock. That’s not say it’s a particularly deep time, sometimes those reflections are petty at best, but I can’t help but think about how events have unfolded. And, while not as much personally has changed as I would have liked, I can at least say that I’ve always done my best to grow. I pride myself in keeping an open mind, being willing to hear out other points of view, and change my stance when I’ve seen sufficient evidence I was wrong. In my mind, allowing yourself to change, grow, and find improvements is admirable.

But one thing I’ve learned over the years is that change for the sake of change is often counter-productive. Even with the best of intentions, a lack of a plan or a lack of a reason beyond “it needs to change” will generally lead your efforts down the wrong path. Growth and progress generally require forward motion, where as simple change can be perfectly sideways instead. And the problem with going sideways is that it often isn’t really fixing anything so much as it’s just making it “different”. This applies to all aspects of life: whether it be your personal habits, politics, or even your work.

As writers we have to accept that change is necessary more often than we’d like. Sometimes this is a matter of editing, or the occasional ret-con. These are, while painful, a simple act of identifying the problem and fixing it. But other times there are changes where it’s much harder to identify the next step or the correct course of action. These are a greyer area, somewhere you can actually come away making bigger mistakes. And, because of the risks involved, it’s important that entering these changes requires we have a solid plan of action.

Unfortunately, sometimes, people don’t… Continue reading To Change With Purpose →

Writing

Which Darlings Do You Kill?

You’ve completed your work. It’s not perfect and you can recall many nights where it seemed to be more of a hassle than you expected, but you’re certain it really was worth it in the end. The little bumps and rough spots throughout can be patched over in no time and you’re already thinking about how much people will love it. But one thing is truly standing in your way before you can get it to those people: you still have to edit the damn thing.

Those rough patches, a mark of late nights and caffeine fueled fever dreams, are more than just a little inconvenient. To you they’re excusable because you know the story behind each and every one. But to the audience, those are strange artifacts with no real reason to be there and only make you look like an unprofessional hack. Typos alone probably account for half of your work past sunset (or, if you’re really out there, past sunrise). And there are just some scenes that are needing some trimming or outright removal. The famous old adage rings through your head, “kill your darlings first”. You take a swig from your poison of choice – whether it be from Juan Valdez or Jack Daniels – and get ready to set about your grim work.

Just one question: how the hell do you know which darlings to kill? Continue reading Which Darlings Do You Kill? →

Miscellaneous, Observations, Writing

Why “Hallmark” Movies Suck

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With one set of holidays behind us and a couple on the horizon, we’re in the midst of what I would consider the Hallmark movie season. Though not all are strictly “Hallmark” movies, it is the time of year where a great deal of made for TV movies with similar themes flood networks that honestly have nothing better to show – particularly those aimed at “family”. These movies are easily identified by the fact they all have the same earmarks. First, they’re centered on a holiday or an event that happens to be family oriented. Second, their central plot (often the only plot) is generally based around that family dynamic one way or another. And third, the cast seems to have been slipped something before the cameras started rolling.

It’s never the cast’s fault, mind you – it’s just the way of the genre almost by default. Made cheaply and probably written on the back of literal Hallmark cards, these movies are the tried and true made for TV garbage that you watch only because you have nothing better to do. That’s not to say there isn’t an audience, there most certainly is, but most of that audience is either bored, lonely, or both. The few who don’t fill these requirements generally fit into the archetype that the characters themselves are based on. And even if you like some of them, you know, deep down, that they’re not exactly works of art. The scenarios rarely make sense, the characters are about as two dimensional as a greeting card, and any emotional weight is based primarily in how soft a target you happen to be.

And almost all of us know this. Though a few are fond of a couple of these, and others might have a straight up guilty pleasure of the bunch, we all know we’d rather be doing something else if we had the choice. An entire channel is devoted to these movies, and few would willingly watch it, but a dedicated, nostalgia driven fanbase keeps the thing afloat. Once, when about to watch one of these movies, my friend – an avid romance fan – asked me why I was looking to torture myself. Simply put: I was morbidly curious.

So, it raises a question: how can a business based entirely on human emotions have so little a grasp on how those emotions actually work (and how do we avoid the same mistakes)? Continue reading Why “Hallmark” Movies Suck →

Miscellaneous, Observations, Writing

Getting Out Of Your Own Way

Despite their differences, every creative field has similar challenges. You have to have a vision to make it work, and often that vision has to be something really important to you. If you lack the sufficient will and determination, you’ll generally not get very far in whatever you’re trying to create. Whether it be a painting, composition, or a novel – you have to go in being a little bit single-minded. Distractions are easy, after all, and there may be people who want you to do something else entirely. There may even be parts of yourself, or outside voices, which tell you that you’re not good enough. As a result, finishing requires being able to tune all of that out and push forward despite almost everything.

This, despite how neurotic creative types may be, actually requires a great deal of pride, even ego. It’s not something we have all the time, but when it comes to our personal work we can be incredibly stubborn. In fact, quite a few of us have to train a sense of self-righteousness. It often becomes something of a monster – an inner asshole. We hone a bit of our personal ego and our passion for the project to craft this alter-ego which shuts out certain opinions and doesn’t care what others think.

Everyone actually has a version of this inner asshole, just expressed in different ways and to different degrees. We don’t like this side, but it still exists – giving us the ability to be egotistical enough to not be swayed from our goals.  The stronger it is, the easier time we have doing things that would otherwise scare us. Some would say that requires some sort of an emotional callous, but callouses are numb and this other facet of our personality is still pretty damn passionate. The greats are generally people who can turn this on and off at will, able to achieve a degree of tunnel vision when necessary but then shut it off when it’s no longer helpful. They keep this personality in check for as long as possible, unleashing it only when needed.

always-angry

Unfortunately, this is a double edged sword. A lot of you already know how hard it can be to take criticism well, but there are other times in the middle of the project that we often overlook. For every determined artist there’s a moment where they’ll find their project in a place other than where they intended it to be. Maybe you’ve gotten half way through the painting and realized that it isn’t matching the image in your head. Maybe the natural flow of events in your story has come to a different place. Maybe the thing you were so attached to turns out to not work very well at all. At this point, those people who once had so much determination are now facing a brand new kind of problem.

You have to defeat the monster you created… Continue reading Getting Out Of Your Own Way →

Writing

A Strong Hook

The first sentence of your story can be the most important you ever write. It may not be the most profound, the most interesting, or the most eloquent – but that really doesn’t matter. It starts the first paragraph, which starts the first page of the first chapter. It’s the first of a series of barriers you have to cross to truly draw someone in. Though rarely enough to chase someone away, it starts something that will carry you through to the end.

And you probably just winged it.

The reason these things are so important is that it does more than simply start off your story. I’ve already talked about beginnings being a pain in the ass, but the earlier in the story you are, the less there is of the story to give context and substance. As such, that first sentence, the first paragraph, and the first page are essentially you pitching the rest of the story to the reader. Even in visual formats like comics and films, the first shots are going to tell the viewer whether they want to even sit through any of it. And that means, despite the fact it’s generally one of the hardest sections to write for some people, it’s also one of the few sections that matters on its own.

No pressure, right? Continue reading A Strong Hook →

Observations, Sci-Fi, Writing, WTF

Cosmic Disasters

Every year, as this time comes around, I sit back and think a lot about what exactly scares people. So many things that we deal with in our everyday lives can be so unassuming to most but absolutely terrifying to a few. But as I once pointed out, I’m not particularly afraid of things that require a lot of abstract thinking. Stick me in a situation where my entire biology is telling me to get out and I will be fairly afraid, but if I have to imagine something hurting me, I generally also imagine being able to fight back. Masked men with a machete? I wonder why no one’s grabbed the farm tools they just ran by. Animatronics in a pizza shop? I’m familiar with how fragile animatronics actually are. And, as much as people are caught up in some sort of clown hysteria right now, there’s really only ever been one clown outside of fiction that anyone had any real reason to be worried about.

john-wayne-gacy-clown-pic

Well, maybe two if you count the threat of obesity.

ronald-mcdonald

This doesn’t just hold for the small personal horrors either. As I pointed out once about the apocalypse, a lot of the allure for these scenarios is the feeling that we could somehow plan or prepare to handle them. Every apocalyptic story involves the survivor who finds their way out of it and deals with the horrors in front of them despite the odds. Aliens have invaded? You’ll join the resistance. Zombie hordes marching across the landscape attacking everyone they come across? There are entire websites devoted to planning your survival strategy. And nuclear winter? I know it sounds absolutely terrifying but we’ve actually survived something like that once before. So, despite how horrible they may seem to a lot of people, they’re never something I really sit back and worry about. As I once told my friend, the things that actually have kept me up at night are the things you could never prepare for.

Because where can you hide from something that makes the planet uninhabitable…? Continue reading Cosmic Disasters →

Miscellaneous, Observations, Writing, WTF

Copyright Confusion: Macross Edition!

(To ensure there’s no confusion here: I am not a lawyer, I am a writer who has an interest in these subjects because I would like to not be sued or ripped off. Noble motivations, I assure you.)

Copyright, it’s a funny thing. Having recently stepped into a hot debate, I found myself watching people argue with certainty over the nature of copyright law. Amusingly, most of these people were so absolutely sure they knew how copyright law works that you’d think they were all lawyers. For or against, both sides of the debate thought they knew for a fact what the law said on the subject. In fact, both were pretty adamant that the other side were thieves. And they “knew for a fact” because, according to these well-meaning souls, copyright is a simple to understand system that follows common sense. So, once I stopped laughing, I started writing on the subject.

As I’ve been pointing out ever since, there isn’t always as clear a picture as people like to believe there is. In some very black and white areas, it works – you can’t just duplicate someones work or distribute pirated copies (usually). But once you get to the matters of intellectual property, you’d be amazed how hard it is to parse out the solution. The system as it stands today has many glaring flaws that make it difficult to trust that it’s always going to work. Certain provisions within the copyright and trademark laws are intentionally murky, some things are entirely subjective, and most of the time you can’t tell what the truth is until a judge decides. This results in a system where no one is really able to get anything clarified until a lawsuit comes into the conversation. Unfortunately, the little guy can rarely afford that, so the big boys usually win.

In the end, most of us depending on the law to protect our works are depending on people acting in good faith. Generally, we like to hope that people are honest players. We like to imagine that legal action is like a big red button behind a glass case you break only in case of emergencies. In a grey situation, we like to imagine that people stop to hesitate and consider whether they should actually do it. No one would blindly and willfully hit that button just for the sake of hitting it, right?

Wrong.

A plethora of people abuse the system to lock it in their favor even if it shouldn’t be. A great example would be the situation mentioned last time when Saban, owners of Power Rangers, sued a game parodying Super Sentai and other Tokusatsu series. This game existed well within fair use, being a parody based on an entire genre that used no copyrighted or trademarked materials. But, apparently, when you see a team of colorful characters climbing into a bizarre machine – Saban wants you to think of them.

clowns

It’s a ridiculous situation, but one that happens all the time. Some companies go out of their way to sue for things they have no right to sue over. They’ll plant themselves on a copyright, trademark, or patent and then use that to strong-arm other companies. But, to be fair to Saban, they do have some legal claim to the IP and that makes them a lesser of evils. Instead, to find a really glaring example of copyright abuse in a similar situation, I’d like to tell you about a franchise from Japan and why a lot of you probably haven’t heard of it before… Continue reading Copyright Confusion: Macross Edition! →

FICTION, Mythology, Mythology World Tour, Writing

Mythology World Tour: Brazil

The Fantasy Genre has long been dominated by the religions and customs of countries touched on by the Crusades. While this makes sense, with the familiar image of a knight wandering foreign lands being key to the genre itself, there has been stagnation in recent times. As such, I’ve taken it upon myself to look into the cultures of the world and find fascinating details about other mythologies often overlooked by the genre we so love, going on a bit of a tour of world mythologies.

The cultures of Europe and Africa have had some interactions with each other in the past, especially along the Mediterranean coasts. Egyptian mythology influenced Greek, as did Amazigh, and the same could be said the other way around. Many have known of the influences of Christianity on modern day Voudou and related groups. But that blend is rarely so complete that it would be difficult to know the origins of which belief came from what group. Though sometimes the details get lost to history, like with Poseidon being part of the mythology of the Amazigh long before being introduced to the Greeks, there is still some evidence from long ago that makes it possible to separate the two.

But what happens when that blend is a lot more complete and a mythology starts to form after the blending?

Behold, the beauty of the mythology that is Brazil. Having been settled by the Portuguese during the colonial period, Brazil’s culture was heavily influenced from not one direction but rather three fully unique sources. The first, of course, was the indigenous people of the region, the Tupians in particular – a group defined by their language group, Tupian, which includes 70 different dialects. Then, as the Portuguese arrived, they did what Europeans generally do and tried to convert the country, introducing a whole new language and their culture. And, as the Portuguese arrived, they also brought along slaves, as the Europeans tended to do at the time, and introduced the unique flavors of the Western African cultures covered in earlier entries of this series.

The result was a wonderfully complex blend of the cultures of three different continents playing off of each other and creating something new. While the origins of some ideas are easy to identify, most are a gestalt which has grown greater than the sum of its parts. A creature shaped like something from the Amazon could behave like an African deity, be associated with a Christian concept, and have a name based on the Portuguese translation of a Tupian word.

So, while it would be impossible to cover the whole of such a rich culture in the space of a lowly blog like mine, it’s a time to give a brief look into the world of… Continue reading Mythology World Tour: Brazil →

Mythology, Observations, Writing

Strange Creatures, Stranger Desires

Since almost the dawn of civilization, people have claimed there are no such thing as new ideas. I’ve never been one to buy that, seeing as we’ve come so far compared to where we were in the past, but it’s still something people like to trade around. However, looking at the stories we tell and the repetition of plots and archetypes, it’s easy to understand why some would disagree. We like familiarity, we like to see something that feels comfortable to us, and thus newer ideas often sit as niche for a while. The other ideas, the old well-tread stories, are easier to push forward and thus easier to notice. Generally, they feature something timeless that doesn’t require a lot of change to feel contemporary.

But even those are usually different as time goes on, we’re always adding to what existed before. Sometimes, those changes even happen without the fans wanting them to happen. One of the loudest criticisms of the Twilight books is what they did to vampires and werewolves. Fans of the horror genres felt that creatures which could have been “cool” and threatening were now fairly pretty instead. Unfortunately for those people, it wasn’t really Twilight’s fault and that ship sailed a long time ago.

pitt-vampire

But not very long ago I mentioned that the same was happening to a more unexpected creature. Once upon a time, zombies were a fairly scary thing which were seen as this ultimate form of “the other”. But as time has gone on they’ve lost a bit of their edge. They now feature in comedies, dramas, action movies, and even…romances. With the production of things like Warm Bodies and iZombie, we’ve managed to find ourselves seeing zombies as something that you could love and be attracted to. And for whatever you may think of the over-saturation of the market – that’s a relatively new idea that in 36 years has taken us from this:

dawn-of-the-dead

To this:

liv

So, the question becomes: How exactly did we go from head-shots to money-shots? Continue reading Strange Creatures, Stranger Desires →

Miscellaneous, Writing

Monday Musings: Smarter People, Dumber Books

In recent weeks, as the mountains burn above my head and machines give walnut trees a violent hug, I have found myself once again in the midst of allergy season. Mind you, due to the drought in my state, every season is now technically allergy season. But recently I have no choice but to spend my days halfway between the realms of life and death. Unfortunately, limbo is boring. I know, I know, it’s better than hell itself but I’ve found myself with not a whole lot to do as I wait for someone to finally complete the rituals to raise my corpse. So I decided last week to make an effort to finish all the books on my shelf, including the ones I didn’t actually intend to buy.

I’m sure that sounds like I have some sort of collecting problem, but it’s actually a little more mundane than that. Due to a blood pact I signed with a book of the month club several years ago, I have quite a few books sent to me that I kept simply out of being lazy. These books aren’t necessarily bad, just not something I had any real interest in, but several are at least in a genre I am willing and able to enjoy. So, getting over my distaste for some of the authors, I picked one up and started reading.

But, after a few chapters, I have regretted my life decisions.

Stephen King often said that one of the benefits of writers constantly reading is realizing that published works can be terrible too. He also called the author I’m currently reading a terrible writer. And, while I haven’t finished, I’m already guessing Stephen was right on both counts. I won’t name the book, or even the author. It’s actually true that bad reviews still generate sales. But I can tell you that I checked several times to confirm this was a New York Times Bestseller in my hands, so they’ve clearly conned enough people already.

It’s actually amazing, in this day and age, just how many books can be sold. People take it for granted because we’ve always lived in this advanced society, but once upon a time you would be hard pressed to find someone who could read – let alone afford to spend money on books. Reading was the hobby of the wealthy, sophisticated upper class and was essentially the domain of bored nobles who needed to escape from the day to day grind of not getting syphilis.  Today, in a world of 7 billion people, over 86% of those can now read.

So why do the best selling books all seem to be determined to treat us like idiots? Continue reading Monday Musings: Smarter People, Dumber Books →