Month: March 2011 (page 3 of 5)

Grains of Salt

March 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Courtesy laryn.kragtbakker.com
Courtesy Jared Fein & laryn.kragtbakker.com

Sooner or later, the work you do is going to come under fire. Mistakes are going to be made. Guess what? You’re a human being. Mistakes are inevitable. How those mistakes are handled, corrected and prevented from repeating themselves matter more than the mistakes themselves, with the experience informing the better construction of future works. Hence, “constructive criticism.”

It tends to work best, however, if the criticism begins with you. And as a critic, you suck.

At least when it comes to your own work, that is. Your opinions, your creations, your procedures have all be formed by you (or, in the case of opinions, possibly snatched from more prominent critics for rapid regurgitation – we’ll get to that) and you’re going to be as defensive of them as any creator is of their created. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, and I know how that sort of behavior can circle right around and kick you square in the ass just when you don’t need it to.

It’s like bruises in martial arts, loose teeth in hockey, a face covered in egg on a televised debate. It’s going to happen. Beyond a couple of opinions of yourself and your creations that I can tell you are patently untrue, how to get back up when one of these events flattens you is a matter for the moment and circumstance. Communicate, discern, be patient and communicate more. Nobody will get anywhere while blood is up and words are lost in the volume, so step back, breathe, look at the situation and act in the interest of everybody involved, not just you.

Okay, enough hand-holding and team-building, here are two big fat lies we tell ourselves when it comes to stuff we do.

This Is The Best Thing In The History Of Ever!

No. No, it isn’t.

Criticism
The following might feel something like the above.

The things we consider great only got that way through long, grueling processes, the input of several people and the viability of whatever environment into which they were released. There’s a factor of luck involved as well, but that’s not something we can control, so we’ll leave it out of this deconstruction.

Basically, to keep ourselves going, we may at times tell ourselves that what we’re doing is good. That’s fine, and it probably either is good or will become good. What it isn’t is the best thing ever. Not on its own, and especially not in its first iteration. No author I know of hit the bestseller list with their first draft or even their first book. No director makes an Oscar-winner the first time they point a camera at something, unless they got their hands on the super-secret list of critera the folks in the Academy check off when they watch movies that might be worthy of the golden statues they give to rich people. Then again I’ve grown somewhat jaded with the whole Oscar thing and it’s colored my opinion somewhat.

That’s another thing. Opinions. Now I’m as guilty of the following as another special snowflake individual on the planet, and it bears saying & repeating to myself as much as anybody else. I’m fully aware of the glass house in which I live, but dammit, sometimes you just gotta toss a rock.

Your opinion is unlikely to be entirely your own. It might be right or wrong, but to defend it like it’s gospel is not going to win you any friends no matter from where or whom it originally derived. Our tastes, viewpoints and leanings are a combination of our life experiences, the things others say and do around us and the environment in which we live. Other people have had similar experiences, heard or seen the same things we have and/or live in similar environments. That means your opinion is highly likely to be not entirely your own and should be taken with a grain of salt, even if you’re telling it to yourself.

Back to your work. I’m sure it began with a good idea. Ideas can persist through edits, revisions and future iterations. The idea might still be good even if the implementation sucks ass. That doesn’t mean the overall product is good. A good idea badly implemented makes for a bad product. Look at what happened to Star Wars. What’s important to keep in mind is that you might not be able to find all of the flaws in your own work, and in order to make it the best it can be before it ships, you might need to take some knocks to the ego. If you can remember that your idea and work are not the Best Things Ever, if you can maintain the ability to take your own creations with a grain of salt from an objective viewpoint, the overall product will be much shinier for it.

TL,DR: Don’t act like your shit don’t stink.

This Absolutely Sucks & Will Never Amount To Anything, I Should Quit Now

Courtesy Disney
Cheer up, emo donkey.

Ah, the other extreme. I hate this one just as much.

Let me pause a moment before I rant in the other direction from where I just came from. If you truly feel your time will be better spent doing somthing other than the thing that you’re considering the absolute worst that humanity has to offer, I can understand that. Go and do the other thing you want to do. I and others might still consider what you’ve done worthwhile or even worth sharing, but you are the best arbiter of how to spend your time and energy. Just remember others are entitled to their opinions as much as you are.

Okay? Okay.

Remember how I said that the things we consider great didn’t start that way? That means they started in a state of not being great. In fact some of the first attempts probably sucked out loud. I’d love to see a first draft of The Stand or an early shooting script of RDM’s from Battlestar Galactica or Michaelangelo’s first painting. These creative minds only became great after the grueling process of editing, revising, being told they suck, editing and revising again, and managing to find the right time, people and environment for introducing their work.

Since soothsaying isn’t exactly a reliable basis for planning, the only way to find the right time is to keep trying. Finding the right people means going out and meeting some. And locating the right environment can be a matter of research. Don’t try to put a work with a narrow genre focus into purveyors with general, broad interests; try instead to locate an venue catering to similar tastes and passions to whom you can relate and communicate, and let them see what you can do. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a monumental achievement, but it wouldn’t have gotten painted if Michaelangelo had been approached by the manager of a Starbucks instead of His Holiness.

Notice that this is all stuff you can control. Your work is no different. If you really think your work isn’t good, and you want it to be, you can improve it. Work at it. Practice. Don’t let the nay-sayers and the lowest common denominator and the mediocrity get you down. Nothing excellent ever comes to be out of nowhere and without some work and sacrifice. Give up some time, expend some energy, burn a little midnight oil, and make that thing as powerful and awesome as you can. And believe me, most of us are capable of being pretty damn awesome if we’re willing to pay that price.

TL,DR: Don’t act like your shit is a world-scale biohazard.

I think I’ve said about all I can on this subject. No human being is the be-all end-all of all great things; neither are any of us completely and utterly irredeemable. I think we could all stand to take things said to us, about us and by us with a few more grains of salt.

Eulogy for the PC

March 16, 2011 / / 2 Comments

Courtesy Zedomax

My wife’s corner of the living room is dominated by an anachronism. An aged, clunky CRT monitor squats on top of the bookshelf behind her desk. On that desk, now, is a shiny new Acer laptop with a wider display than that old beast, not to mention much faster & cleaner peformance to the oversized paperweight of a PC to which the old monitor’s connected. I keep meaning to move things around so she has a little more room, but I can’t help but look at that corner and think of Bob’s Big Picture feature on the death of the PC.

I’ve been building my own PCs for years. Ever since I got one sore knuckle and torn finger too many from the confines of a Packard Bell case, I’ve wanted to make the experience of working with computers easier and better. For years it’s also been the case that upgrading a system through the purchase of a pile of parts has been more cost-effective than buying something from a store shelf, to say nothing of the flexibility and lack of bloatware inherent with taking the construction & installation onto oneself.

But technology is moving on. My wife’s laptop cost as much as the upgrade I just put into my desktop case, and while the bleeding edge Sandy Bridge processor will satisfy computing needs for (I hope) quite a few years, her laptop is just as good. If the ancient external drive to which I’d saved our Dragon Age games hadn’t ground that data into powder, it’d have been a completely painless upgrade. That won’t happen again, of course, because not only are the hard drives we have today lightyears ahead of that dinosaur, we can always upload our save data to a cloud.

And it’s not like I need my desktop to write. I do most of these updates in a text editor (gedit, if you’re curious) before taking the content and putting it into the blog, enhanced with pictures dropped into Photobucket and the occasional bit of rambling audio. I can do that with pretty much any device. Within the next year, fingers crossed & the creek don’t rise, I’ll be retiring this old workhorse of mine with some iteration of the Asus Transformer – hell, I’d write blog updates on my Kindle if it had a decent text editor.

My point is that as much as I love my PC, as nostalgic as I’ll wax about StarCraft II marathons and isometric views in games like Dragon Age: Origins and LAN parties and simulators like Wing Commander, there’s no reason not to celebrate the growth of the technologies we as gamers use to enjoy our hobby. The tech emerging on a steady basis is lightyears ahead of what many of us grew up using. From number crunching to heat management, the computing devices we use today are so superior to those old devices it staggers the imagination. If I went back even ten years and told myself that within a decade people would be using tablets in lieu of laptops and there would be laptops that turn into tablets on the horizon, I’d congradulate myself on being such an imaginative science-fiction writer. In my humble opinion, technology changing and evolving is a good thing, and there are a lot more benefits than drawbacks when it comes to embracing that change.

The thing is, as Captain Kirk pointed out once, “people can be very frightened of change.”

“They made the game easier to play and dumbed down the mechanics! TO ARMS!”
“This has nothing to do with the previous parts of the narrative because it’s using new characters we don’t know! A PLAGUE ON EVERYONE’S HOUSES!”
“WHAT? Visual changes that make things unfamiliar/derivative/different from before? KILL IT WITH FIRE!”
“PCs are no longer inherently superior to consoles? LIES AND SLANDER, I SAY!”

Start a bandwagon and you’ll be sure to find people happy to jump aboard it without forming opinions of their own.

In fact the lemonade (haterade?) being served on TGO’s bandwagon is rather refreshing, now that you mention it.

Where Camp Belongs

March 15, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Courtesy DEG

There exists a type of stage play that’s so absurdly over the top as to defy belief. I’m speaking of the pantomime. Burlesque is another one that comes to mind. The subject matter of these productions could be anything, from teenage romantic angst to the Holocaust, and goes so completely across the line of good taste that they circumnavigate our imaginations and strive come out the other side where things are so ridiculous they’re awesome again. It can be a very tricky thing to do, and it doesn’t always work.

In a similar vein, we have an unspoken sub-genre of films called ‘camp’. The degree to which a film tends to be considered camp is directly proportional to the degree to which it takes itself seriously. If it tries one time too many to make a legitimate point or be more than camp, it’s going to fail and the campier bits will just seem silly. Let it take the piss, however, and the overall effect is one of a fun if meaningless romp.

MovieBob mentioned camp in his review of Red Riding Hood, and cited two examples that I feel serve as great ‘bookends’ for camp. On the one hand, we have Batman & Robin. Now more than once, this little flick tries to harken back to the campy days of the Adam West television series, but more than one serious story point, complete with straight-faced sincerity and somewhat bland delivery, is tied to the absurdity the way a concrete block is tied to the ankle of someone who disappointed the boss. I’m not saying Batman & Robin would have been saved if you’d taken out the subplots involving Alfred & Mister Freeze’s wife, but it’s definitely one of the movie’s many problems.

On the other end of the scale is Flash Gordon. It in no way takes itself seriously. Horny evil overlords, impromptu football games and breathing in space are all handwaved in the name of having a good time. The color palette is vibrant, the actors larger than life (especially in the case of BRIAN BLESSED) and the whole thing is powered by the music of Queen. I can’t think of a campier movie that still manages to be enough fun to not overstay its welcome and make the audience feel like they spent their time well.

There are a plethora of films in between these two. Some will try to tap the same vein and not quite get it right, like Masters of the Universe. Others will keep the special effects, music and sensibilities modern while keeping the level of seriousness quite low, like Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy. From Independence Day to Moulin Rouge, there’s plenty of camp out there, and it isn’t all bad.

Sometimes you want to crack open that doorstopper and take in some serious long-form fiction, and sometimes you reach for a comic book. Camp is that comic book, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It has its place in our libraries, a space where it belongs, where our need for escapism exceeds our desire to remain in the real world. And it can work very well, unless you try to take it too seriously or otherwise muck it up.

I’m looking at you, Schumaker.

Return to Thedas

March 14, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Courtesy BioWare
Son? You’re never going to be king unless you sack up.

Due to the fickle nature of aging hard drives, I’m playing Dragon Age: Origins again, in an attempt to reconstruct the history lost before firing up Dragon Age II. I know I can choose from one of the pre-determined backgrounds BioWare included in their new fantasy role-playing game, but one of the things I’ve always liked about BioWare’s games is the ways in which the things we as players do matter to future titles. That, and their well-written, well-rounded characters.

In an age where graphical hardware is pushed to its limits and gaming action is kept as repetable and generic as possible to maximize repeat success and profit, it’s heartening to see games that take their subjects and characters seriously, as a nuanced narrative rather than a brainless distraction. Games like Dragon Age also free characters from rails, allowing the player to modify the storylines of those around them as well as their own with means outside of violence.

I’m not saying that a game like Call of Duty can’t have well-written, well-rounded characters. It’s just been my experience that allowing the player a measure of freedom in their interaction with the characters around them creates more opportunities for those characters to develop. Character growth can be difficult to depict in video games, outside of numerical stat increases, and when it’s done well it can be inspiring for those looking to grow characters in more traditional means of telling stories.

Most works with which we toil as storytellers have a cast of characters in support of the protagonist. Assuming these characters have at least a passing resemblance to human beings, they should be affected by the events that take place in the story. They should be shocked, shaken, disturbed and disgusted by things. They should celebrate with each other when goals are achieved, and mourn when loved ones are lost. I think it’s vitally important that these things, mentioned even in passing, will help make the story in question more palpable for the audience, drawing them in deeper and delivering a more fulfilling experience.

I griped previously about the length of Dragon Age: Origins and yet here I am playing it again, end to end, with nary a complaint. It’s partially because I’m something of a completionist with this stuff, and partially because I feel I know the characters well and want to spend time with them. Even so, I’ve learned more about them this time around, and I’m curious how some of their interactions play out amongst each other. By letting the characters have breathing room, and including a variety of reactions and suggestions instead of leaving them entirely blank, BioWare deepens what could have been a somewhat generic MMO-styled RPG into a truly memorable storytelling experience.

I hear Dragon Age II is different in some regards. As long as the characters are good, I’ll be willing to forgive some stylistic changes.

The First Is Never The Last

March 12, 2011 / / 1 Comment

Bard by BlueInkAlchemist, on Flickr

When I was young, I thought all writers did was write. Someone like Heinlein, Niven or King just sat down, wrote out a masterpiece and bam, instant cash prizes. I probably don’t have to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. Good writers go through a lot more than that. There are quite a few steps between a nascent author and the bookstore shelf or e-market. The environment is changing and some of those routes diverge, but they all start with good writing, and that means more than your first draft.

It’s shit, by the way.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Writing a first draft from beginning to end with something substantive in the middle is not an achievement to sneeze at. Plenty of people don’t get that far. I’m just saying don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back. The first draft is just the first step, which is how journeys of a thousand miles begin. And trust me, if you seek an audience for your writing outside of your mother, it’s going to be a long haul.

The proofreading and editing follow the first draft immediately. When I say ‘immediately’, though, I don’t mean in terms of time. Don’t finish your draft and then begin tearing it to shreds. Give it time. Like a fresh-baked loaf of bread, you’ll want to let it set for a bit to firm up, then start carving it up while it’s still warm – while the work is still fresh in your head.

At this point you might even want to pass it off to someone else. Maybe you have a friend who knows their grammar. Or you can hire someone to rake your work over the coals. It’s a harrowing thought, your newly-formed creation in uncaring hands. It can feel that way, sure, but if you do enough research, maybe shop around a little, you’ll find someone to work with who is not uncaring, who wants your work to succeed as much as you do, and is interested in making it the best it can be, even if it means telling you how bad it is in places.

This won’t be your last editorial experience, either. Boxers go for rounds with one another until one of them is knocked out. College baskeetball teams take the month of March to put themselves through a grueling tournament, the winner having played at least six games in very short succession before being crowned champion. So it is with editing. You need to keep hammering at the work, the way a smith does with the heated metal under his care, to make something more useful, more profitable, perhaps even elegant. Eventually, after several drafts, you’ll come to a point where you look at the work and, while you might still see some flaws, it feels like something a stranger would actually enjoy reading.

You still aren’t done.

Now you need to get it out to the public. You need to query an agent. Follow up on a pitch. Respond to a request. You might even be putting it up in a Kindle store or on iTunes. However you want to get it in front of strange eyeballs, that’s what you need to do now.

Before we move on to that, though, take a look back at that first draft. Let yourself laugh at the circumstances of the changes – how the dynamics shifted due to an edit, how much better the work is without a certain line, etc – and how they came to be. Again, you’ve gotten a lot further than most, and now you have a better chance of making something happen just by virtue of your writing. Your work is out there, waiting to be discovered.

It’s when the work gets picked up by someone with interest and enthusiasm that your next step, your true test, begins.

Older posts Newer posts

Legal Stuff

Creative Commons License

BlueInkAlchemy.com by Joshua E Loomis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Some rights reserved.

Categories

Archives

© 2024 Blue Ink Alchemy

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑