The A to Z Book Diary: "B" is for Bring on the Bad guys

There's nothing like a good Bad Guy to get your story on track. It's the old yin-yang principle: to have light, you need dark; they balance each other out, and act as counterpoints to drive each other's motivations and development within the story.

And from the writing perspective, let's face it... bad guys are just so much fun to dive into and bring to life. They're just so interesting. And I mean this in the least twisted way possible.

Along that train of thought, an update on the progress of my writing New Years Resolution: so far, so good! I've actually been sticking to it (wonders never cease), and have cheerfully plowed through scrawling out (yes, by hand - I'm old fashioned that way... I have an odd fondness for getting ink stains on my fingers) four pages of brainstorming where I laid out pretty well every main aspect of the plot (which is definitely going to be a trilogy), and about six pages of the story. I scrapped the beginning I'd written ages ago, and tackled it from scratch.

And... *drum roll*... it's working - I'm almost in a state of shock, after metaphorically beating my head against a wall more often than not for years. It's amazing what I'm getting done, now that I've decided to flick that annoying inner-brain "is my writing/story good enough? what if it's not??" switch firmly to the 'OFF' position. HA!

But, I digress - Bad Guys. Heh, what a good time. A real and delicious puzzle.

Writing the Good Guys is for the most part straight forward; obviously, they still have their flaws (they'd be one-dimensional cardboard cutouts without them), but largely they have some sort of recognizable moral compass that is universally accepted and makes them relate-able and the ones that people root for. But the Bad Guys... their compass is the warped antithesis of the Good Guys', and the writer (and the reader, down the line) is left with all sorts of great questions: what's "right", and what's right in this guy's head? How far would he go? Why? What wouldn't they do? Do they have a line? What happens when they cross it? Oooh, the possibilities for moral complexities and everything that goes with them are endless. I'm still in the outlining stages for my principle Evil Doer, which the main hero has yet to meet, and this guy is shaping up to be downright elemental... in some ways literally. But I won't spoil it by giving too much away :)


And all this rambling about it has my creative brain revving its engines - if I have any hope of focusing on schoolwork (exams... right... I need to study for those, don't I?... meh, debatable), I'll need to go pour out my page for the day. 

Now where's my pen...

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The A to Z Book Diary: "A" is for Avast ye, Apprehensions

Ahhh. 'Tis the season for Christmas lights, hot chocolate, carols, turkey dinners... and end-of-semester hair-pulling and insomnia over pre-holiday assignments and exams -- it's a good thing I'm geared more towards looking on the bright side, otherwise being a student would absolutely ruin my holiday spirit every year, especially since the city I'm living in for university never seems to get a decent snowfall, and what little snow it does get melts within a week. Hmf.

Anyway, on that brighter side, I've dug myself out from the most recent avalanche of schoolwork and procrastination on schoolwork, and have decided most diplomatically to further procrastinate in the area of studying for my exams next week in order to start another posting thread on this little blog 'o mine: The A to Z Book Diary, which will serve as a sideline for keeping track of progress on getting my first novel written... partially for commiserating purposes if any other writers happen to stumble this way, but mostly to guilt myself into keeping consistent with working on said novel. We've all got to have our ways to actually get things done - hopefully things like this will get me from "aspiring" to "published", sometime before I hit my golden retirement years.

Heh, here's hoping.

As always, if anyone reading feels so inclined pop by in the comments and share some rants of your own - the more the merrier XD.

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So I've re-realized an old revelation that every writer-in-progress gets to time and time again: in the area of progressing on a potentially marketable work of fiction, I am my own worst enemy. Coming up with story ideas... not an issue. Ideas bubble up from all over the place (which is why very little homework gets done in advance of the night before due dates). Sticking with one idea consistently enough to make a novel out of it, on the other hand... yikes. 

I'm not sure if this is an apprehension that goes away once you've gotten those first couple of novels out there and gained some sort of readership, but no idea seems quite good enough to be "The One" - that is, the one that feels like it's got what it takes to maybe turn into that golden goose that will get you noticed as a writer, rather than shuffled off to the bargain bin after a few months of gathering dust. And I've found that the more time goes by, the worse these apprehensions get, until rather than the creative half of my brain happily feeling like this...

Image courtesy of SalvatoreVuono/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

...it ends up feeling more like this...

Image courtesy of BoazYiftach/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In short: no good shall come of this, young grasshopper. Ouch.

But I've made my New Year's resolution early this year, and hopefully posting it here will make me keep to it. I have picked one idea for my starter-upper (one which lends itself to a potential trilogy-ish structure), and come hell or high water, I'm sticking with this one from beginning to end. Obviously wouldn't be too bright to detail the whole thing online, but in the broad sense, it's a modern fantasy-type thing, semi sci-fi-y, and falling in the Young Adult (YA) genre.

The official Resolution: this *bleeping* thing is getting written. Rants and generalized brainstorming will be posted here periodically to keep my brain from imploding in the process, and from here on in, it's going to be a page per day at minimum; screw the apprehensions - do you hear me?? I'm done with you all!! HA!!!

Anyway. To Be Continued... Stay Tuned... o_0

Writing Tip #1: Start With a Plan of ATTACK!... Then Take a Breath, Grab a Coffee, and Decide What You'll Actually Do

Do I have any technical Writing Workshop teaching credentials that make me specifically 'qualified' to dole out advice? Not so much, no. But what I do have, for whatever it's worth to the faceless blogging and blog-trolling crowd, is 15 years of trial and error in working towards writing for a living. So, for anyone who's desperate enough to pay any attention to this random internet blogger (are you really that desperate?...really?...my condolences), "Writing Tips" will be an oft-updated series of short segments of helpful little things I've learned for myself that just might do the trick for someone else as well. So, here goes - and if anyone has any luck with these, or has any of their own they'd like to share, feel free to drop in on the comment section below!

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We've all been there before, many, many times: you have that moment, that burst of pure, electrifying inspiration, and you make a lunge for your pen-and-paper/laptop/pen-and-nearest-bare-wall because you're going to map out your goals, and you'll stick to them, and you'll write and write and write, and finish that fantastic project you've been trying to finish since forever...

...then by the next afternoon - Day 2 of your Master Strategy (very emphatically capitalized), or maybe by Day 6 or 7 if you're especially determined - the unshakable faith in said Master Strategy has mysteriously dwindled and you forestall filling that poor blank page/screen/wall any further in favor of ordering a pizza and watching reruns of How I Met Your Mother in your pajamas. 

That last part may be a bit more personally specific, but the principal's basically the same: plans may work for a lot of people, but for many others, it seems making out a writing schedule or a cast-iron story outline is like making a New Years resolution to get a gym pass and use it every day or a few days out of every week - it has a tendency to get neglected before you can actually get anywhere with it.

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So, Tip #1 In a Nutshell: don't prescribe your writing. Whatever your project, whether poetry, essay or fiction (short or long), just set aside enough time to write exactly one sentence/line of poetry every single day to start with. It doesn't matter what it is - a line of dialogue, a random tidbit about a character or back-story, or an idea for a plot twist or something that you haven't even decided where it'll fit in yet. Get that one sentence out every day at minimum (certainly more, if the inspiration strikes), and keep it all collected together. And at the end of every week or two weeks, peruse everything you've written, and put in a little time on organizing what you've got to date to see where you stand. And then keep on adding to it as you go. You'd be amazed at how quickly your thoughts and ideas stack up into a bigger picture!

You Said It, Lewis

'Writing'. What a wonderfully ambiguous and mysterious profession. I remember reading my first real novel as a child and thinking, "This is it - this is what I want to do. I want to spend my life putting great words to paper and making stories out of them." At the time, it seemed that was all I needed: to decide that that was the direction I was heading in and, like an aspiring policeman or dentist or teacher or accountant, go off to get whatever prescribed training I needed before launching myself into a career.

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As it turns out, it's not quite as simple as that. Instead, following that absolute certainty of purpose, my road to my dream job thus far has been filled with years of writing stalemates, dead-in-the-water short and long stories, hair-pulling plot frustrations, and plugging away at a degree towards a day-job that'll hopefully pay the bills and put food in the fridge. And after all this, here I am at 23 years old, practically living off of mac 'n cheese, sporting 1.5 post-secondary degrees and until recently, still without a  glimmer of any sort of publishing credit to my name. To say the least, not at all what I used to imagine whenever I'd drift off on an idealist's daydreams, imagining life as a Lee Harper or a Mark Twain or a Jules Verne (discounting, of course, the mac 'n cheese, which remains delicious in any circumstance).

Do I wish then that the whole process would speed the heck up, and stop being so unbelievably frustrating and drawn-out and full of false-starts?... Not for a second.

Uh-oh. I feel a paradox coming on.

Strange indeed, but true. If this mess were easy, I get the impression this would feel more like a rainy-day hobby than a life's dream... though I might also have dodged getting my first few premature grey hairs. But that's besides the point.

Today, I received my very first acceptance letter for a short piece of creative non-fiction, which informed me of its impending publication in the online January 2014 issue of TWJ Magazine. And in the middle of feeling so light that I half expect to lift out of my desk chair and float away at any moment, I'm reminded of a quote by C.S Lewis:

"With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere." 

So here's to that beginning, which I've decided to salute with this blog - a place to rant about and happily plow through the endlessly torturous and fantastically rewarding mess known as the creative process. Here goes nothing - let's see where we end up.

 

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