Apparently I've given up on numbering these. Huh. Well. Josh wrote an entry about ideas and getting things going and privacy and it got me thinking about my own writing. I'm not going to post anything here -- you know first rights get messy when you post on websites, and I want to keep my options open right now, especially since, ew editing -- but it occurs to me that I talk and talk about writing, but my own history remains clouded.
You might not be interested, but this is my blog and you don't have to read my entries, so I'm going to do it anyways.
I don't remember when I started writing specifically. There is an old book I made when I was 6 about someone who lost a tooth, and old diaries in which I wrote things about fairy stories I wanted to write to evidence that its been a while. I can't remember not writing. I do remember the first time I started a novel. It was, in some ways amusingly, fanfiction for Julie of the Wolves. It was awful, and involved a ten year old kayaking down the east coast as part of a race. I did get about 60 illustrated pages in before I stopped, worried that it was too similar to Julie of the Wolves.
My next attempt was with Josh and Jasper. Jasper had gotten really into Warcraft 3000, and was telling us about the story and we got into a discussion on how to make a story that would work. This is the first and only time me and my brother have collaborated on anything creative together. Usually Jasper pisses me off too much for us to have conversations, so it seems like we're unlikely to start that again.
Sometime later I had a tutor who wrote a 14000 word story with me, which I illustrated and for the most part I plotted. I still have it somewhere, and its amusing to read. I sent it to a magazine once, but they said it was too long (what a surprise).
Serious fantasy came next because I started reading Tamora Pierce. There was the Five Worlds series which has since been lost, Rise of the Phoenix, which actually wasn't a terrible idea and when I put it up on the original fiction part of fanfiction.net got reviews that shaped my future writing career. I had a problem with pacing in seventh grade, and this person wrote an extensive review of how I should read more and needed to pace things better. I got mad at yelled at them later, but I wish I knew who it was now, because -- well everything changed after that.
There was Apinda, a novel I wrote with Felix and Rory's help the summer before ninth grade. It was basically an idea similar to The Old Kingdom but there were some clever bits in there about races and a world banded in seasons. Unfortunately I'm a bit too science-y to be willing to write it now, plus I would need to reestablish a connection to the characters, but it was an idea at the time. Apinda was the first novel I ever finished -- hand written in a notebook I have since lost. I loved that I finished it.
I was about to say I didn't know what I did between ninth and eleventh grade, but it occurs to me that it was the RP phase of my life where I wrote consistently for days and days and days with two people (for the most part). Cat, who helped shape Adair and Will, and Dany who helped create Jacob and Cnyderia. This was probably the most industrious part of my life, the time when I got the most practice and worked out my pacing issues. This was the part of my life where everything was about getting to write that post, to get things out. I often say that RPing is a great way to become a better writer (maybe not here) and it is because this was the point where characters became different from me, the point when I found my feet as a writer. RPing may have screwed me up socially (okay, it did. My second boyfriend came around during this time and I dumped him because he was cutting into my RP time... how screwed up is that? Also, I stopped being friends with certain people during this time, and in the end, the person I was closest with during RP vanished abruptly and without warning, leaving me with a host of issues that probably precipitated the break with my current (at the time) best friend... I have suffered for my art... or am just a screwy person, your choice) but it gave me a huge amount of practice (there was so much writing all the time) and cemented my love of writing.
After that novels started coming out every year. I started NaNo and wrote -- a lot. Since then I have written 6 novels in their entirety and have countless other projects which are all at least 10,000 words in (mostly because these days 1 chapter is 10,000 words x.x). There are two novels which I have begun the clean up of, three which are never going to see the light of day (partly because half of them got lost when my hard drive died, and partly because THEY ARE SO BAD), one which is actually all right, but is the first book in a series that I don't know where it is going and one which has been turned into a web graphic (a graphic novel on the web if I ever get around to putting it up).
Um... I don't know why I wrote this. I REALLY don't know why you read this if you got to the end. It was a bunch of rambling because I was reading Josh's post (have I mentioned Josh is my cousin? I don't know if I have, but he is, and probably the person out there who I have shared most of my creative endevers) and he has this one project which he has been working on for years, and I was like "What have I got to show for a lifetime of writing?" (lifetime = 22 years thus far). This is what I've got to show. Seven novels, two that I would be willing to show to anyone. Well, show might be a little bit of a stretch.
After the RP phase, I stopped showing people my writing, or talking about the fact that I did write. People who knew me from before knew I loved to write, but people after often get surprised when I say I write, and their surprise surprises me. I could probably read something in to that, couldn't I?
Monday, January 31, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
On Comedy
There is something to be said about talent in the field of comedy, a personality that goes well with being funny. From the reading/watching documentaries about my favorite comedians (Eddie Izzard, Jon Stewart, Margaret Cho) the personality type that brings out stand up comedians is perseverance. It is not, in the end about being really funny (though I'm sure it helps). The ability to talk into the silence is what makes a good stand up comedian, and as I am currently writing a blog about writing and don't even have the guts to share my writing with my best friend, stand up is probably out for me. Not that I really wanted to do it.
The other kind of comedy you get is from writing. There are mediums to writing comedy and shows that come to mind almost at once for me: the straight up sitcom (Friends, How I Met Your Mother), the dramady (Castle, Psych), shows that are serious drama but have humorous moments and sarcastic comments (Sherlock, Doctor Who), novels that are humorous (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, David Sedaris pieces) and so many other forms that listing them would waste your time. So the question becomes, how in these contexts, do you create comedy. And do you want to include it (the answer is yes, always yes).
Comedy looks easy and is hard while drama looks hard and is easy. You can kill someone off in a dramatic, horrible fashion easily, but you can't just have someone walk into a room, slip on a banana peel and have people laugh. So the first thing I think about when attempting to write humorously is practice.
I am a big proponent of practice. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, brings up the point that most people who are considered to be geniuses in their fields are in fact, simply well practiced -- a lot practiced in fact. He goes into a magical number, and while its interesting, its not the major point, you can read the book if you want to know more. The point is that practice is very important. I don't think I had really grasped this until I took a class in logic and discovered that the only way to learn logic was to do logic problems, over and over again until something clicked. But then it started bleeding into other parts of my life. I realized that chemistry made more sense because I had practiced problems in it to the point where it was intuition that brought about the answer, I found that when I was saying my characters were "telling me" how the story went, it was because I have read and written for a long time, and my mind was following the path that stories go in, piecing back extraneous information from the first chapter to make it very important without me even realizing it.
Practice allows you to write without thinking about it, which in turn, allows you to write effortlessly, discovering the story as it comes out of you, and seems natural instead of forced. So, shouldn't practice help you fumble for the joke, the moment that will be the most funny? I don't see why not. Most people say when you start attempting humor, you should write in the voice of someone you admire who is funny. When you do this, you are starting to ingrain the flow of your humor, you are practicing being funny the way you want to be.
So practice, its important, but there are other factors involved, of course. These factors do depend more on genre then on anything else -- after all the joke in a sitcom is not the same as the joke in a dramady, and the joke written for TV can fall flat on the page without an actor to prop it up.
I suppose though that there is a common theme to comedy and that is taking something and expressing it in a new and unexpected way -- juxtaposing situations, or physical gags -- but always leading to some greater truth. Comedy gets to express truth through making you laugh, and I think in some ways, it makes the lesson stick better that way.
Now, if only I could write it. I'm just going to attempt witty at the moment. ;)
The other kind of comedy you get is from writing. There are mediums to writing comedy and shows that come to mind almost at once for me: the straight up sitcom (Friends, How I Met Your Mother), the dramady (Castle, Psych), shows that are serious drama but have humorous moments and sarcastic comments (Sherlock, Doctor Who), novels that are humorous (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, David Sedaris pieces) and so many other forms that listing them would waste your time. So the question becomes, how in these contexts, do you create comedy. And do you want to include it (the answer is yes, always yes).
Comedy looks easy and is hard while drama looks hard and is easy. You can kill someone off in a dramatic, horrible fashion easily, but you can't just have someone walk into a room, slip on a banana peel and have people laugh. So the first thing I think about when attempting to write humorously is practice.
I am a big proponent of practice. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, brings up the point that most people who are considered to be geniuses in their fields are in fact, simply well practiced -- a lot practiced in fact. He goes into a magical number, and while its interesting, its not the major point, you can read the book if you want to know more. The point is that practice is very important. I don't think I had really grasped this until I took a class in logic and discovered that the only way to learn logic was to do logic problems, over and over again until something clicked. But then it started bleeding into other parts of my life. I realized that chemistry made more sense because I had practiced problems in it to the point where it was intuition that brought about the answer, I found that when I was saying my characters were "telling me" how the story went, it was because I have read and written for a long time, and my mind was following the path that stories go in, piecing back extraneous information from the first chapter to make it very important without me even realizing it.
Practice allows you to write without thinking about it, which in turn, allows you to write effortlessly, discovering the story as it comes out of you, and seems natural instead of forced. So, shouldn't practice help you fumble for the joke, the moment that will be the most funny? I don't see why not. Most people say when you start attempting humor, you should write in the voice of someone you admire who is funny. When you do this, you are starting to ingrain the flow of your humor, you are practicing being funny the way you want to be.
So practice, its important, but there are other factors involved, of course. These factors do depend more on genre then on anything else -- after all the joke in a sitcom is not the same as the joke in a dramady, and the joke written for TV can fall flat on the page without an actor to prop it up.
I suppose though that there is a common theme to comedy and that is taking something and expressing it in a new and unexpected way -- juxtaposing situations, or physical gags -- but always leading to some greater truth. Comedy gets to express truth through making you laugh, and I think in some ways, it makes the lesson stick better that way.
Now, if only I could write it. I'm just going to attempt witty at the moment. ;)
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
A Thought
Kat wrote an EPIC fanfiction piece for Yuletide (now moved elsewhere, but this will give you an idea of what it is) which has somehow wormed its way into my brian (impulse was to say soul) and we are currently in the early stages of writing a TV series based on it. Its fun and stimulating, and its helping me (and Kat too) work on our humor writing (impulse was to say circuits. The RoseyBot 2010 has defective humor circuits, hopefully in the RoseyBot 2011 will have had some practice by the end of the year and a re-released model will be better equipped to provide you amusement), and work on being NOT SUPER DRAMATIC ALL THE TIME (evidenced by my use of caps).
Anyways, the point is not about the TV show or the fic, or humor writing -- though there may be a post on that in the future -- but rather it is about characters.
Shockingly, I like characters. I think people know this by now, but if not, I like characters. Why does this matter?
Well Kat made a comment about how one of her characters, a jock who was woken up at an odd hour, thought about going for a run. The comment goes something like this "I would never think to go for a run. [He] really has a mind of his own."
I hadn't thought about it much until now, but my response was "Of course he has a mind of his own, he's not you." Funnily enough though, once I did begin to think about it, the thought occurred to me that I remember the first time I thought something similar.
I must have been a freshman in college, and a character of mine, who is all about action, and not sitting still, and chasing after bad guys, was told she was going to have to read, and she threw a minor hissy fit over it. Reading, Sam stated (as her name was Sam), Is for boring people. I don't read.
I have never written a main character (being one of the POV characters) who doesn't read. Some of them are avid readers, others are not, but all of them were well read, and had a certain grasp on why literature was important. Sam was completely different. She wanted nothing to do with books because they bored her.
In other words, she had a mind of her own.
It was invigorating, exciting, and it gave me a whole different set of ideas about characters I already had in the world, and how I was just viewing a tiny facet of all of them. Sam was different and it was a minor miracle to me.
I think its good to get into the minds of other people -- after all it does take all kinds to make the world -- but I find it fascinating how there is a line at which you stand when you're a writer, the line between yourself and your characters, and with each successive character, with more practice, the line begins to sharpen rather then blur.
Has anyone else experienced the first moment when they truly felt separate from their characters? Was it great, or did you feel it was bittersweet?
Anyways, the point is not about the TV show or the fic, or humor writing -- though there may be a post on that in the future -- but rather it is about characters.
Shockingly, I like characters. I think people know this by now, but if not, I like characters. Why does this matter?
Well Kat made a comment about how one of her characters, a jock who was woken up at an odd hour, thought about going for a run. The comment goes something like this "I would never think to go for a run. [He] really has a mind of his own."
I hadn't thought about it much until now, but my response was "Of course he has a mind of his own, he's not you." Funnily enough though, once I did begin to think about it, the thought occurred to me that I remember the first time I thought something similar.
I must have been a freshman in college, and a character of mine, who is all about action, and not sitting still, and chasing after bad guys, was told she was going to have to read, and she threw a minor hissy fit over it. Reading, Sam stated (as her name was Sam), Is for boring people. I don't read.
I have never written a main character (being one of the POV characters) who doesn't read. Some of them are avid readers, others are not, but all of them were well read, and had a certain grasp on why literature was important. Sam was completely different. She wanted nothing to do with books because they bored her.
In other words, she had a mind of her own.
It was invigorating, exciting, and it gave me a whole different set of ideas about characters I already had in the world, and how I was just viewing a tiny facet of all of them. Sam was different and it was a minor miracle to me.
I think its good to get into the minds of other people -- after all it does take all kinds to make the world -- but I find it fascinating how there is a line at which you stand when you're a writer, the line between yourself and your characters, and with each successive character, with more practice, the line begins to sharpen rather then blur.
Has anyone else experienced the first moment when they truly felt separate from their characters? Was it great, or did you feel it was bittersweet?
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