I’m glad that the writing competition I mentioned yesterday has a deadline in August instead of its original, which would have been tomorrow. I think I have more work to do than I thought.
Creative people in general, and writers in particular, need to take care when it comes to their own hype. It’s one thing to be confident in one’s abilities, but it’s entirely possible to be over-confident and believe you have a project in the bag right up until the point you show it to somebody else. On the flip side, criticism – even at its most constructive – can trip up the flow of one’s planned work schedule to the point of making you want to scrap the whole project and start over.
We (or at least I) do these things because they’re easy.
It’s easy to think that you’re awesome. And it’s just as easy to get down on yourself, toss out the decent baby with the dirty bathwater and begin again. The part in the middle, having the confidence to salvage the best parts of your story and the humility to admit something you might like in said story doesn’t work and needs to make way for more things that do work, is more difficult. Hell, just typing out those few words was hard.
We have to killourdarlings. We have to turn our work over and make sure everything stays put. We have to throw it at the wall and see if it sticks. Or breaks the wall entirely.
Here’s an example. I like my characters deep. I like knowing where a character comes from, what shaped them, what makes them interesting enough to keep a story going. The problem is, when they first come forth from my head onto the page this depth takes the form of exposition, backstory, setup. The thing is, when people come to see a play, the set’s already up and painted. Nobody comes to watch the false walls get nailed in place or the stage crew bicker at each other while the painting’s going on. Writing’s the same way – it’s fine to write out this backstage stuff, but do it someplace the reader doesn’t have to read it if they don’t want to.
Especially in short fiction. Get in, tell the story, get out.
And be very, very careful of how much you buy your own hype.
I have an entry created for Blizzard’s writing contest, and while I think it’s okay, I want to be doubly sure it’s highly polished and as Blizzardy as possible. But it’s not about what I think, is it? It’s going to be read by other people.
So I need other people willing to read it. Specifically, I’m looking for at least two.
I need someone familiar with StarCraft. The game has some particulars in terms of lore, background, themes and mood. I want to make sure I’m hitting all of the major touchpoints and haven’t completely botched my timelines.
I also need someone familiar with writing. The words I’ve chosen are in a particular order, but I don’t know if they’re in the best order. I’ve gotten great feedback on Citizen in the Wilds thanks to people looking at the order of my words, and I’d love this little short work to get the same treatment.
Leave me a comment if you’re interested. I can send you an invite to the Google document via the email address you’ll input to post the comment. Once I’m a bit more confident in this, I’ll send it off to Blizzard and start making burnt offerings to any deity within celestial earshot.
It’s amazing how moving something small can make a huge difference.
We’ve been in the process of rearranging our apartment. The latest change saw a large stack of things by the lower corner of the bed, meaning I’d have to crawl out of it in a somewhat awkward manner. Over the weekend (Sunday night in fact) we moved things again, and I took it upon myself to shift that stack a bit, resulting in a much easier way for me to get up and about first thing in the morning.
I woke this morning with more energy and determination. All because I moved a couple boxes.
It’s hard to say how things will turn out when you start rearranging things, cleaning them up, putting them in a different order. The same thing could be said about writing, especially the revision process. Move a couple of words, put sentences in a different order, and hey presto, something that was just a brain-dump of information becomes taut and dramatic. Clean up a few things, and a mess becomes a masterpiece. It can even cure that thing we used to call ‘writer’s block’ before some sagely men in manly beards told us writer’s block is a crock.
Has this happened to you before? What are some good examples? Do you have particular days when you clean things up, be it around the house or in your writing?
Today’s guest post comes to us courtesy of Monica Flink. She’s a long-standing and very dear friend who is also struggling to get away from the day job environment through the power of the written word. She’s been published on AOL.com, Lifescript.com and eHow. She has guest lectured at colleges and is a regular contributor to Squashblossom Literary Magazine. Her blog is Poached Prose.
So of course he had a massive coronary shortly afterward.
Death by cake is not something that the world thinks of seriously. It is reserved for chintzy chain restaurants that want to advertise a dessert that tastes decent but is pulled out of the freezer and reheated when you order it as something worth the extra three dollars. But it puts the idea of death on the discussion table, and how it seems to be easier to accept in fiction, especially the more ludicrous it happens to be.
There are so many ways for people to die. Human beings, though the top of the food chain, are fragile creatures when you think about it. Hundreds of functions go on without our knowing it, and just one of them can go wrong and kill us. If a heart stops beating or a kidney fails to cycle out waste, our lives are snuffed out as easily as a candle under an industrial fan. Sometimes without us even realizing that there is something wrong. But natural causes aside, there are also so many ways to stop those functions with resources.
The oldest books in the world, whether you believe it is the markings of the Pyramids, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, have touched upon death and have done so with plausibility. Albeit with swords and bird things that come to collect us all to the Afterlife, but it worked for those time periods. And there you have the heart of the matter. Plausibility in death. Harrowing up the feelings of readers for the payoff you so desire by giving the protagonist, antagonist, or hapless bystander the right send off, so to speak.
Making the death of characters believable is difficult at best, and mostly because so few of us have trouble not only imagining such horrible things, but have been given such a skewed idea of it from the media. I need not name names, but let’s face it, those Hostel moves are shit on a stick, and younger generations of writers are going to see that garbage and assume people who are tormented like that will not just die of shock unless they are medically treated.
Luckily, fiction lends its self to this problem, because fiction is just that: fiction. It need not be as realistic as other visual media, but then again, it may make things more difficult. A writer might think it cool to have someone die while crushed by tap dancing giant iguanas wearing feather boas, but even if circumstances in a work of fiction lend themselves to that kind of end, it is still hard to write. Just as it is hard to imagine someone dying by having a piece of cake that no one should eat more than a single sliver of.
Proof that truth is stranger than fiction, even with death involved?
Perhaps. Yet, it reveals not only how difficult it is to make death in fiction plausible. It is easy for us to accept that a magical spell can rip the heart from a person’s rib cage, or light them in a pillar of unquenchable fire, but only if the story lends its self to such ends. If a piece of fiction has been all about guns and car chases for a hundred thousand words, to have it end with someone falling in a river and drowning, or perhaps just being strangled to death, is not only anticlimactic, but the exact opposite of what would probably satisfy the audience.
In the end, it comes down to how well the characters are written, and how well the story lends its self to death. Will it be more satisfying to have the main villain die when he goes careening off a comfortably placed cliff with a few sharp spikes at the bottom that just happen to be there, or have an aneurysm in his brain splatter across the gray matter when he samples a piece of cake that should have never been made in the first place?
Coming up with a quote about writing about death would have been an excellent way to end this. Instead, I leave you all with the idea that writing about death does not have to be horrible, difficult, or even creative. It just needs to be believable.
Thanks to my friends at Geekadelphia, my wife and I were able to enjoy an advance screening of Salt. We walked out of it wondering the same thing: why is a movie dealing with a villain put to bed twenty years ago coming out now?
Remember how Yahtzee equated the United States to a prize fighter who keeps yelling at his old rival Russia because they didn’t have a proper title match? “Last I checked, it hasn’t been 1979 for at least 10 years.” In that case he was talking about Battlefield Bad Company 2, but it seems this unfortunate backwards-looking form of inspiration has reached Hollywood as well. Despite the fact that there are all sorts of punching bags for an espionage thriller that’s also a vehicle for Angelina Jolie, Kurt Wimmer’s Salt manages the feat of bringing the Soviet Union’s labyrinthine intelligence plotting back from the dead as an engine to drive the film’s plot.
The plot introduces us to Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative married to an arachnid expert. She’s getting ready to enjoy her anniversary when a Russian defector walks into her office claiming to have vital information. Placed in an interrogation room with Salt, the defector reveals that he has knowledge of a presidential assassination plot going down in New York City in 24 hours. He even knows the name of the assassin: Evelyn Salt. Pointed out as a possible mole, unable to reach her husband and trapped in her own office building, Salt needs to facilitate an escape and find a way to prove her innocence. Or carry out her role in the assassination plot. Or go on vacation. Or get her nails done. The question I asked myself while actually watching Salt was, “What the hell is she up to?” he desire to see what exactly her plan was kept me going all the way to the end credits.
A lot is made of the identity of Evelyn Salt, and to the credit of Wimmer’s script, Philip Noyce’s direction and Angelina Jolie’s acting, we’re never quite sure who’s side she’s on. She conveys emotion when she has to and turns it off when it’s time to kick ass – par for the course from the creator of Equilibrium. The film seems aware of the fact that it’s a vehicle for Jolie, and never really gets in her way. We’re never out of sight from our leading lady for more than a minute. Her performance here is definitely more in the vein of Wanted than Changeling, but she’s at least somewhat interesting to watch.
In fact, the cast isn’t uninteresting and does rather well all around. None of the performances feel forced, none of the actors gnaw on the scenery and they’re given interesting stuff to do. Liev Schreiber has quickly grown on me as a supporting actor, with a quiet intensity and growling voice that isn’t overshadowed by Angelina’s presence. Chiwetel Ejiofor isn’t bad, either, channeling a bit of the drive that informed his performance as the Operative in Serenity. The script is fine, never going into camp territory or stopping to wink at the audience. The action is at least somewhat inventive in places and it’s shot well by Noyce, never becoming too confusing or too loud, a tip some other directors could take. In fact, all of these elements make it a more-than-decent thriller, and a thrill ride besides.
But the best writing and acting in the world can’t overcome a bad premise. It’s like building a brilliantly designed and carefully constructed house on a beach with bricks of sand as your foundation. It’s not going to end well. Salt never completely collapses, but the idea that the spectre of Soviet aggression would rise up from the shadows of the past to seek revenge on America for a war that never got to the shooting stages and resolved itself almost two decades ago is pretty preposterous. I can think of at least a few people who will see this film, take it as at least partial fact, and use it as just another thing that we should be afraid of, in addition to terrorism, socialist medicine, communist market oversight and fascist environmental controls. BE AFRAID. WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT. OBEY US.
Dammit, there I go getting political again. I told my controllertherapist very patient readers I wouldn’t do that any more.
*twitch*
Since posting this review on the Escapist the night I saw it, I’ve gotten some stick for apparently being ‘naive’ and ignoring the threat that Russia presents to America. The thing is, though, I know we’re going to get spied on. Espionage does not automatically mean open conflict. In fact, if it gets to the point of a car chase or a gunfight, the espionage has failed. So, when the US busted that Russian spy ring recently, was I surprised? Not really. I’m sure the US has spies all over the world as we speak. I do see the point made to me about not being naive in terms of espionage happening right now, but I have to opine the idea that espionage inevitably leads to open conflict is very far-fetched. To anticipate that sort of hostility is to live in perpetual fear, and that is something I refuse to do.
Stuff I Liked: Decent script, well-shot action and a brisk pace. Stuff I Didn’t Like: Dammit, leave Russia alone. The war’s over. Stuff I Loved: If I loved anything, it was seeing Angelina kicking ass and seeing how creatively she was dealing with the people she didn’t kill.
Bottom Line: It’s not a bad movie. It’s a decent little espionage thriller that suffers from the aforementioned idiotic premise. You’d be okay if you wait for it to come out on video. There are other movies out there that deserve to be seen in a cinema. Like Inception.
