Unwholesome; Detrimental to health; Poisonous

National Novel Writing Month

2008-11-14T13:01:00.002-06:00

NaNoWriMo: Write fifty thousand (50,000) words, in the form of a novel (complete or not), in the thirty (30) days labeled "November."

Rules: Everything must be written DURING the month. Nothing before (you can do whatever you want after November ends, but it doesn't count for your score).

Personal Rules: While it is not illegal to include external writings, such as school papers and blog posts, written during the month of November, I prohibit myself from doing such.

Status: My NaNo Profile

Statistics:

Day 14: the start of the second weekend in November and the second major potential for a word-count boost. If all goes according to plan, I will reach 30,000 by the end of the 15th, putting me 5,000 words and three days ahead of the game.

Summary/Excerpt: Try again later. ;) I'm busy, and this is private until at least draft 3!

tl;dr: Do NaNo!

Taking Notes

2008-10-31T21:41:00.002-05:00

This sure sounds like fun, doesn't it?

Well... fortunately, it's nothing like taking notes for class. It's more like journaling. Or blogging. You do it when you do it, and you do it because you have a reason.

While you're writing, one of the most useful tools on the face of the planet is a set of notes. Your thoughts on the plot, random musings about the characters, et cetera, et cetera. They don't have to be in paragraph form, and you're not turning them in at the end of the week. It's just a place to keep track of the things you come up with while you're NOT working on your story (that's when ~50% of my ideas come to me).

This is especially important for your general writing weaknesses. Whatever you're not good at (in my case, it's coming up with names), you do as much as you can in whatever note-taking medium you prefer. This helps so that when it comes to the time you need to put that skill to action, you have a repository of information you've stocked up from the hundreds of hours you're not at the keyboard, and you can just pull from it instead of halting your writing.

In a sense, it's like a Writer's Block antidote. Sure, notes won't solve all your problems, but they sure help (especially if you're just over two hours from starting a month-long writing extravaganza).

Ineffectual Affects

2008-10-03T23:47:00.002-05:00

According to, well, almost everyone (un-cited), the human mind has to be exposed to a piece of information three times in a short period of time to commit it to long-term memory. In practice, it will probably take either more or less exposure to actually memorize something. That's just how to life works. In theory, practice is the same as theory.

Really, though, I'm more concerned with the extreme ends of the spectrum. What happens if you say something four dozen times? What if you only say it once?

Chances are, nobody's going to remember. In the first case, 99% of the time, the exposed will discard not only the repeated information, but likely everything else you say. Hearing something four times is annoying, hearing it fifty times warrants a vicious ear-severing, complete with rusty scalpel and no anesthetic.

The most oft-heard phrase in my dorm/on campus is "I'm looking forward to X!" The second is "The sun is bright!" There are only so many ways to respond to the exact same statement after hearing it daily for fourteen months. As a result, I have trained myself to remain silent (and ignore everything) for around five minutes after one of the aforementioned sentiments is uttered.

In the second case, only saying something once, you'll wind up with a similar result. Nobody's likely to remember it, because, intertwined with everything else you're saying (or writing!), it doesn't have a chance to stand out. For that reason, it's important to repeat something of greater significance and not something of minimal significance.

I've decided to try to keep these posts as succinct as possible (you should see last week's; it's around 98% shorter than normal), so I'm going to leave with one more thought:

Repetition for effect?

No. No. No.

There are approximately 0.43 people on the planet who have a talent for effective repetition. Everyone else comes off as either pretentious or irritating. So unless you're less than half a human, or otherwise know (thinking you know is not the same as knowing) you are very good at what you do, please, spare everyone. There are better (safer) ways to get a point across.

Keep your info-dumps natural and unforced wherever possible. Chances are, if something's actually significant, it'll come up several times, all on its own, over the course of your story. If it doesn't show up, and turns out to be substantially significant, rest assured I'm dismissing your work along with the other mountains of deus ex garbage I've read.

A Precautionary Precedent

2008-09-19T13:04:00.012-05:00

If I were to become a teacher, I would be one of those who started class every day with an anecdote. Not the kind that spends sixty percent of class talking about hunting and the other forty inviting teenage girls to the back room, but the kind who can somehow come up with a quick diversion that somehow has something profound to do with the topic.

For example...

In order to live in the "good" dorms on campus (aka, the ones that cost twice as much to get a private shower and balanced gender division), students are required to take a half-credit class (it should technically be one credit, because we meet for a full hour each week) from a number of boring, uninspired options. Art: do nothing, occasionally look at pictures. Experiential Design: form groups to design and build a device with which you participate in a competition against other teams. The catch: nobody cares. Global Research: listen to lectures by different researchers on campus. Or, in my case, listen to lectures by one researcher on campus who likes to wing things.

Yesterday, we met for our weekly lecture, and it was about as invigorating as a lecture from Dr. Comp. Sci. (self-referential, much?). Here's what happened: the teacher showed up late. He was only late by around five minutes, but it's clearly not the best start. Then, he asks the class for a list of "questions" they have about research topics. Apparently, he hasn't got anything prepared, so he's going to list off the class's questions. So, we do. My table writes (read: I write) something down about the development of artificial intelligence, because I'm really a Comp. Sci. major (I have ambidexterity of the brain—someone go tear apart the roots of that word and make me a new one that applies to brains, please).

Of course, nobody's really paying attention to the teacher, because he's clearly got nothing up his sleeve, and he's not even a bit conspicuous about it. So he starts reading off the lists—as anticipated. Somehow, we unanimously (monanimously) decide to talk about space materials, whatever that even means. All I could think about was space debris. Somewhere along the line, we wound up talking about organic materials or the space between cervical lumbar vertebrae, or I don't even know. Needless to say, it was an awful lecture, punctuated by some splendid technical prowess:

Yes, the teacher's computer blue-screened. It was pretty much awesome. I think I'm going to call him Doc Blue Screen from now on.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that unless you want to fall flat on your face, preparation is an integral practice.

Of everything I have written, only one impromptu work of fiction has ever actually survived from start to finish. And even after going through two revisions and two contests, I still hate it. Everything else is just kind of sitting there, collecting virtual dust, and will probably never be resurrected.

On the other hand, when I go through the trouble of creating, expanding, and developing characters, plots, subplots, and themes before actually diving into the work, things turn out infinitely better. I know when I first started writing fiction, I almost never did any prep work. As a result, almost nothing I wrote back then every got anywhere. I have four novels (including both of my previous attempts at NaNoWriMo) and three short stories that have hardly gotten off the ground because—after the initial "Great idea!" splurge—I had absolutely nothing to write about. Who knows, maybe they'll come back. But before I even write another word of dialogue or narration, you can be sure I'll have a full, detailed outline covering plots, characters, themes, and whatever else I can come up with.

But! As with every rule you've ever been taught regarding writing, this one has a huge exception. Well... it's not so much an exception as a major, major hole. In the course of planning to write a large work of fiction, almost inevitably, your plot will develop parallel to your characters, but not along the same path. The problem with this is that once you get to writing, your plot and your characters need to follow the same path. About a third or halfway through the story, you'll realize that your characters' personalities will absolutely not allow your plot to develop the way you planned.

DON'T PANIC!

This is a good thing. What this means is that your plot and characters are converging (diverging from the theory, but converging in practice), and that you have actually developed characters with personalities: characters that are human (or something like that). But... what next? Easy. You send your plot in the direction your characters would take it, realistically. Any good story's events are controlled by the characters, not the author. The author is God, and if you're anything like me, you consider deus ex machina the bane of fiction. Yes, there can be an element of inexplicable conflict, but absolutely not resolution.

So what does this mean? It means that, even though you've planned your whole story, don't expect to follow your plan to the letter. In fact, that is a more destructive practice than not planning in the first place, as—instead of unfinished and unread—your story is forced and uncomfortable.

(Side note: Blogger/Blogspot needs to work on its formatting system. Italicize something once and it NEVER GOES AWAY. I wrote this note about two paragraphs into this post and just left it at the end just to convince the post editor I didn't want to type in italics.)

A Featherweight Observation

2008-09-12T12:38:00.012-05:00

A rather common theme in fiction (which you hardly see in nonfiction, if that's any indication of its real-world implications) is balance. Good and evil—evenly matched from start to finish, light and dark—literal and metaphorical, fate and chance (a favorite of mine). The implications of this are clear (though often not actually implied), and perhaps even archetypal: "The fate of the world hangs in the balance."

Now, this evokes a nice image: the wispy blackness of fate dotted with the sapphire skies and emerald earth of our world, hanging in a brownish-gold brass plate. The other side of the balance houses evil—or good (intentions?)—in its infinite ignominy and ruby red rage. Who wins? Almost invariably, balance is restored and the world is saved. Right?

That's what people want, anyway. Save the cyberpunk rebels and pessimists (realists?), that is what we want, and that is what we get. After generations of world-balance stories, we've actually gotten pretty good at making the archetype interesting. Jeff Lindsay's Dexter books are all about balance: inner self versus outer self, evil versus evil (and questioning your definition of "evil" every single page), even something so superficial as time-management—Dexter (the character) is a professional balancer.

The fact of it is... all of that is superfluous in light of our real topic: composition.

As easy (relatively) of an art as archetypal balancing is, keeping your story level is tremendously difficult. Even some of the best literary works today (as selected by a panel of unbiased, layman jurors...) fail dismally at this.

In order to keep a story balanced (and therefore more enjoyable to read, and oftentimes less overwhelming), there are a few things you need to watch out for:

• Voice
• Entertainment
• Depth
• Truth

I'm sure you could divide these points any number of ways, splice-and-dice, mix-and-match, and boil 'em into a stew, but that's how I'm going to do it.

Every story has a narrator: fact. As the story's writer, that narrator is you: crap. Actually, chances are, if you're narrating your own story, I don't want to read it. How interesting can you really be if you're sitting down and writing fiction for hours a day? Really? Also: how interesting can it be for you to sit down and write fiction for hours a day and then have to read it back in your own voice?

Compound a boring voice with a bored writer and you have a truly awful piece of work. There are obviously some exceptions: if you're a very funny person, and you can entertain yourself and others fairly easily, have at it. But if you'd really rather not have a discussion with yourself for ten minutes, let alone for three hundred pages, don't use your own voice.

I know, for a fact, writing time for me is escape time. I want to get as far away from the world as humanly possible without LSD or 'shrooms. The last thing I plan on doing is listening to my boring self narrate a potentially interesting story and end up shooting it (or myself) in the face. That's a waste of my time and my readers' time. Instead, I use a narrator befitting of the story. If my story's depressing, my narrator points out the atmospherically depressing details and avoids optimistic metaphors like a wasp's nest. My depressing narrator isn't going to be sarcastic or overbearing, because—chances are—the story doesn't call for it.

Quite often, a story's narrator is the main character himself. This works well, because (unless you're so narcissistic as to be writing about yourself) you have a very solid ground for the narrator's voice, and it's not your own. In third-person (omniscient) narratives, thinking too hard about how the story's written will wind up punching a hole in the fourth wall, but that's better than being boring, after all. It's why we're writing fiction, isn't it?

That's just one solution of many, though. For this year's National Novel Writing Month, I plan on experimenting with my narrator. She won't be a character actually present in the story, but one significant to the story. This way, I avoid duck-duck-goose head-hopping between thirty-six different narrative voices, and I can have a stylistic balance between internal (narrative) and external (dialogue) voice.

Whomever (or whatever) you let narrate your story, make sure they have a distinct voice, but aren't the only voice.

Even though you have voice, that doesn't mean you're set. Hardly. On to actual composition and structure, your story also needs some sort of entertainment factor. If you just plan on dumping fact upon fact about your world or scenario without any sort of excitement to keep me coming, consider me a lost customer.

On the flipside, if you plan on barraging me with action and swords and car chases and zombies and pirates and ninjas and magic and giant fighting robots without telling me where any of them came from, you might keep me busy enough to finish your story, but don't think I'm coming out with any good reviews. Sure, action movies are a great way to unwind after a long day, but they're essentially society's lowest common denominator.

Contrary to the theme of "balance," purely action stories are entertainment overload, and are not—in my opinion—truly "good" stories. But, as I insinuated above, there are infinitely many ways to judge the quality of a story, and I'm certainly not qualified to tell you how to think.

The third—and perhaps most abused—quality of a balanced story is depth.

Consider a swimming pool, perhaps ten feet deep—enough for a good dive or to just play around in. In a pool like this, you'll usually find a deep end (where the diving boards are, hopefully), and a shallow end (maybe three or four feet deep). Not much swimming ability is necessary to get around the shallow end, as the greater portion of society would have no trouble just walking right through it. The deep end, however, is for the more advanced swimmers—who might then meander over to the shallow end for a breather.

But what if you only had three feet of water in the pool? Obviously, the shallow end would be empty, and you'd probably be starved for divers, too. On the other hand, you could wall off the deep end and only fill the shallow end. The pool is more accessible, but still restricted.

The same holds true when you're writing a story. If you want to write something with depth (overarching metaphors, societal commentary), don't forget to put enough water in to fill the shallow end, too. If there's nothing (engaging) on the surface, reading (or watching) your story is like diving into a ten-foot pool with three feet of water. It hurts. A lot.

Take, for example, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (linked above). A solid month of high school AP English was dedicated to reading and analyzing this piece of work. It's deep. It's probably closer to a twenty-foot pool, considering all the analysis time we put into it. But the story is fatally boring. It's a travelogue, so not much can be expected in the way of plot, but the story is dull and dry, and I'd wager that twenty-foot pool has a foot of water... maybe.

On the other hand, restricting yourself to just the shallow end amounts to about the same as writing an action flick. It's there, and it's accessible, but it's not very high quality.

Finally... your story needs some truth to it. Even the wackiest science fiction or fan tasy story should optimally ground itself in fact. This hearkens back to my previous post about rules: readers will be expecting something they can relate to. If what they find doesn't make sense, you need to explain it in the terms of your own world. However, if everything is different, and the reader has nothing to relate to, it's just overwhelming, and the story becomes difficult to follow—very. In essence: a balance between new and old, expected and unexpected, is necessary.

Unfortunately, I don't have a creative acronym for "balance" like last time to wrap everything into one nice, neat package. Instead, I have just one more thought: You can't change yourself overnight. (Truthfully, you don't even need to change yourself—these are just my own thoughts.) Just like your story's composition, you need to keep yourself in balance. Introduce a little bit of something new into your life every day, and if you pace it right, soon enough you'll find something entirely different.

Hopefully, at the very least, you've got a good idea of what not to do if you want to sell me a book.

Read Underneath Large Extraterrestrial Snowmen

2008-09-05T13:06:00.005-05:00

"What?!" you're probably asking. "A blog about insanity above and beyond quirky British science fiction?" Well... I doubt you really had that thought, but if you did, you're in the right place.

Actually, there won't be much science fiction here. Just insanity in spades (and a couple regular ol' spades), and a good old-fashioned rant.

To be clear, before I begin, I'm not actually entirely set in stone with my theme yet. I have, however, found my direction, and I'm tearing down the path as fast as I can, so hopefully you'll be able to keep up.

Oh, and I'll give five points if you can guess the general way I'm headed at the end of this post.

Rules are important—vital, even. Both in reality and fiction, without a concrete set of laws, there is invariably chaos.

An example of such chaos: Today in my Computer Science lecture, the class got back our first homework assignment. The results were universally dismal. We might've seen it coming if we weren't so busy translating Indian Engrish into something digestible, but alas—we missed the mark... by a lot.

In middle school, maybe, or when learning a math in a new number system, it's not bad to expect students to show their work. After all, the method is as important as the answer. But sophomores and juniors at a technology university doing tenth-grade algebra in a computer science class have all the right in the world to assume they don't need to include a play-by-play—especially when the assignment has to be submitted electronically.

Well, you know what they say about making assumptions—and mptions didn't seem too bothered by it. Naturally, the class, almost unanimously, did terribly on the assignment. All this could've been prevented had there been some stated rule that showing work was required. Although, I suppose I can't expect much from someone who doesn't context-check his assignments and steals contradictory website content from another teacher and passes it off as his own.

At the very least, after having spent forty-five years in the United States, you would think he could at least compose complete sentences and understand the difference between "criteria" and "grading scale." Or... perhaps... maybe shed away a little bit of the accent.

I guess I'm just asking too much.

But what about storytelling?

For the sake of argument, let's assume most storytellers are composing in their native language—or are proficient in their target audience's native language. Once the language barrier is gone, all that remains is the writer's ability to craft an engaging and, most of all, believable story, as well as the world in which it is set.

What of rules?

Well, take our world for example. The entire universe is bound by a stringent set of laws and principles, without which we might fall through the floor or burst into flames at any time. And before I go combustible, I would certainly like to know it is a possibility.

This is especially true of stories set in science-fiction or fantasy worlds, where the laws don't necessarily match what we know. And until you establish otherwise (perhaps by spontaneously igniting one of your characters), it is perfectly natural for a reader to assume your world follows the way of the real world. We're all familiar with gravity and water and the way peanut butter complements jelly—but if that's not how it works in your world, show us.

If your world is a world of magic, make sure you establish limitations and consequences (RULES!), otherwise everything stops making sense. Your story stops being fun. You start to entertain thoughts of dropping the class before things get too bad. And, trust me, it will get bad.

I like examples, so let me tell you another story of chaos and disorder, about a world where rules might exist, but they're so far out of reach it's the same as if there were none.

Let me tell you about Shakugan no Shana (specifically, the animated version linked). (I might warn about spoilers, except—due to other glaring flaws—there's almost nothing to spoil.)

In the very first episode, we are introduced to a significant portion of the world:

Power of Existence, a not-so-well explained concept similar to chi or life-force.

Torches, replacement shells for humans who have had their power of existence drained unnaturally. Torches act to prevent universal implosion resulting from the sudden, unexpected disappearance of those they replace, so they disappear slowly—sort of like deflating a balloon versus popping it. You get the same result, but one is much less shocking.

Guze no Tomogara (translated something like "Crimson Denizens," usually shortened to "Tomogara" in the show), entities whose existence received absolutely no explanation. They act, basically, as protagonists. Devouring power of existence as a reagent for devious magic and to unbalance the world. Except for the ones that don't want to unbalance the world. There's not much of a distinction made in the show. Some are good, some are bad. Why? The world may never know.

Lords of the Crimson Realm (translated from "Guze no Ou" or something like that—I blame Wikipedia if I'm wrong on that), are... somehow, similar to Tomogara. Wikipedia suggests they're like an ascended form of Tomogara, but I don't remember anything of the sort being mentioned. Regardless, they're powerful and want to prevent the Tomogara from unbalancing the world. To do so, they form contracts with Flame Haze (...why? If the Tomogara can roam around freely, why do the Lords have to attach themselves to someone else to do anything?).

Flame Haze, whose job is keep the balance in the world. They track the Tomogara (for reference: it was said early in the show, "it's not uncommon to never run across a Tomogara for as long as you live," and we meet something like eight or ten of them throughout the series) and either defeat or clean up after them. They are contracted to a Lord of the Crimson Realm and together do battle with the Tomogara.

Hougu ("treasure tool," or something like that), some sort of magical artifact.

Mistes, a torch with a hougu somehow inside of them.

(I apologize for the huge infodump, but it was necessary to explain the extent of the writers' failure to implement a believable world with rules and laws.)

The male protagonist in Shakugan no Shana is a mistes named Sakai Yuji (cultural note: Japanese names are listed family, given, which is opposite what we would expect in English). Because he is a mistes, he is not only already dead, but he has a magical artifact in his body (who put it there? why him?—It's said to be random, but that doesn't make any more sense than it being deliberate). After several episodes of getting to grips with the fact that he's going to vanish without a trace (hooray for universal memory manipulation!), all of the sudden... he doesn't. Turns out, the hougu he's carrying around (called the Reiji Maigo) replenishes one's power of existence at midnight.

Here are the questions the viewer has thus far: first, what is a hougu? We never hear more than that it's some sort of powerful artifact. Almost limitless, as witnessed around the show's midpoint, where a set of twin Tomogara have a non-internal hougu that replays any "unrestricted spell" (there are no "restricted" spells that we ever run across, though) cast on it eternally. Seriously. Where can I get one? Where are the limitations? Why do they have one?

Second, where do the hougu come from? Wikipedia has an answer, but the show doesn't. They're just... there. Are they constructed? Are they the side effect of a particularly unrestricted unrestricted spell? Why is Yuji's internal, and the twins' external?

Shana, the show's female protagonist, doesn't actually have a name. In fact, she didn't even have a name before she shed her name to become a Flame Haze (because all Flame Haze are called by a unique title associated with their contracted Lord). Why didn't she have a name in the first place? She was a regular human, after all. Early in the show, Yuji gives Shana her name—after her sword. That's not really any better, you know.

Soon after, we meet another Flame Haze, and find out that Shana's a unique one. Apparently, most Flame Haze have a fight to pick with the Tomogara... not because the Tomogora're trying to set the universe in a tailspin, but because they were wronged by one somehow. Why? What do the Tomogara do to irritate the Flame Haze? If it's all about worldly balance, then they're all just doing their jobs, and no hard feelings, right? Tell me what's happening! Please!

How about the magic? Well, it's all about the same thing. Shana has some sort of fire-based power. She can set her sword ablaze, launch flaming meteors, and eventually grow fiery wings and fly. Presumably, her power comes from her Lord, Alastor, portrayed as a small blaze encased in a red pendant that Shana wears. Of course, whenever Shana needs something stronger to accomplish a task, she has it. No questions asked (except by me!), it's just there. Well, except for the romantic side-plot causing Shana to need Yuji around to do anything useful. Since infatuatory (plus points for making up a word?) magic makes even more sense than magic from the abyss, it was clearly the best story direction.

As the story moves on, there's not really much progression. Shana's already got limitless power, and the antagonists have limitless-times-two power (still less than Shana, though), so they can't really go anywhere with that. Instead of barraging Shana with Tomogara, the story would've done better to start explaining the world: where the Tomogara come from, where the hougu come from, the consequences of contracting your frail, human body with a near-godlike entity of infinite power. You know, things like that.

But that doesn't happen: after twenty-four twenty-minute episodes, you have just as many questions as you did after the first episode. Nothing makes sense, and you're no better of a human for watching it.

The moral of the story?

Read
Underneath
Large
Extraterrestrial
Snowmen

Sure the phrase doesn't make any sense, but without rules, your stories won't make any sense either.

Conclusion: don't watch Shakugan no Shana; don't pattern your stories off of it, either.

P.S.: You think this was kind of long for a first (real) post? Yeah, I agree.

It Has Begun

2008-09-04T20:40:00.004-05:00

... What has begun? I dunno. This blog, I guess. I still need to come up with a theme. My roommate suggested the "[h]ypocrisy and stupidity in the movie ratings system," but I can't say I'm as passionate on that subject as he is, and I doubt I could fill my one-a-week quota talking about that.

I'm still up in the air.

As part of the assignment (er, I forgot to mention--this is technically a school blog, but I'll try to keep that particular detail as transparent as possible), it was suggested I choose a subject I can "geek out over" (paraphrase). While I have a quarter-million things that geek me out, I'm not sure what I could write a weekly post on.

Lately, I've been watching far more anime than is really healthy. In spite of that, there are a hundred thousand anime blogs already out there, and perhaps the only unique thing I could contribute would be show reviews, but I keep those to anidb (where they'll get, you know, exposure). (Maybe I could blog about run-on sentences.)

I'm also a bookworm. I currently control three of the four dorm-standard bookshelves in my suite, and they're still overflowing.

I might do a writing blog. The semester does coincide with NaNoWriMo 2008, which I will be attempting--for the third time (for a rather dry, lackluster account of my NaNoWriMo 2007 failure, click here). And it would fit in with the (somewhat arbitrary) heading I threw together. Maybe a combination of interesting words (like insalubrious!), my personal writing experience, creative writing exercises, rants on irritating grammar mistakes (or some of the utterly ridiculous rules). Perhaps. I'll think on it.

Another option--to be more technically oriented--would be a programming blog. However, while programming itself may be fun, I'm already thinking it'd make a frightfully boring blog (for both reader and writer).

Well, who knows? I'll decide on a theme and hopefully there'll be something interesting for next time.