Tag: Writing

Of Girls and Pirates

Girls are neat-o
They're like men, only with boobies & irrational mood swings.
Girls like other girls because the can go shopping together
Boys don't like other boys because they're all poopyheads.
poopyhead
Except if they're pirates, in which case they're awesome.
awesome pirate
I would go shopping with a pirate even though he's a boy
First of all, he wouldn't call it 'shopping' -- he'd call it 'plundering'
We'd go to the mall in his bitchin' galleon
we wouldn't use the door
we'd buy t-shirts with ironic slogans on them
Then we'd totally plunder a slurpie
Sigh... I wish I knew a pirate...
Girl Pirate
Arr -- The End.

Notes

Good things usually come from comment threads on Dan’s blog. Usually these discussions include Elephant Porn and other high arts, but in a recent open thread the basic script of this came up as a comment (or three) by me. Almost instantly I thought it would make a good comic, and decided to attempt it the minute Spyder pointed out that today (the 19th) would be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. How could I resist?

Truth be told, this was actually going to be my rough sketch for the comic, and was done in my little notebook. I had intended to do it on a bigger sheet of paper, but by the time 4am rolled around I abandoned that idea. It was coloured, as usual, in the GIMP.

MY backside is aching from sitting in this chair all day wrestling with the graphics tablet, and I’m sure that over the next few days several aches and pains will show up, but all of those have been nullified in advance by the huge grin on my face. I hope you enjoy reading this comic as much as I did making it; it’s probably the first finished one I’ve done since, well, 1993, I think (it was called Super Monkey, of course).

Far too long to have stayed away from a medium I love so much. It won’t be another 14 year wait for the next one.

V

Madness Averted

script frenzy 2007 winner graphicWhew!

Just under the wire, but I made it! I have now officially reached the target on one of these internet writing marathon thingummies. While there were weeks of inactivity and times when I was forced to work on other things, I was able to put some good — but mostly crap — words to a page, and reach the 20,000 goal.

I’m still not satisfied, however, because the story isn’t finished. No, try as I did, the words ‘FADE OUT. THE END’ were not in my script; in fact, there is a really long way to go.

I could have, of course, rushed it and tried to stick to the 20K goal like a good trooper. Probably I would have been able to tell my story — a bare-bones version of it, anyway. As it stands now I seem to have grossly underestimated the size of the story. It’s not the simple little fantasy fairy tale as I had imagined it, but it sort of still is (who knew that two people in a room would need more description than a massive battle between armies?). It’s taken me 20,000 words to get to the point that I would imagine as being 15 minutes into a two-and-a-half hour movie.

I’ve also discovered that the story doesn’t quite work as a movie anyway. Some of you may shout ‘Trilogy!’ at this point, and I’ve mulled that over too, but there just aren’t any good break points to make it into such a beast.

I suppose the best thing it could be is a miniseries of some sort, but all of this speculation is useless at this juncture, because it’s a barely complete less-than-first draft version of a story that has many, many holes in it. I will continue writing it, if only because I’ve set it up as a project with which I have no expectations of showing it to anyone for, like, ever, so I can be as messy and incoherent with it as I want to be (lots of descriptions that go, “she has teh big boobz hehe” and “whoa, its all ‘splosionz!”).

If it ever shows up, then it will be in some kind of visual form. A graphic novel, perhaps, seeing as I have no access to a studio (animation or otherwise) who would be foolish enough to produce my work.

Not yet, anyway (evil laugh).

More stuff about writing soon, including the inside story of a Savant tale I’ve been putting off for a month in order to write this Script Frenzy thing. Hope you’re all being creative. I miss youse guys.

V

Script Frenzy: Week One

It’s been a week since Script Frenzy started, so I figured it was about time for an update. Off to a slow start, but quite optimistic. Read the full article for stuff about the script, screenplay formats, first draft tips, and why sometimes a large choice is a bad thing.

1. Establishing Shots

Like most people, I heard about Script Frenzy through an email from the NaNoWriMo people (it’s run by the same guys) and wasn’t sure if I would sign up, given my generally unsuccessful results with NaNos previous. I’ve just never managed to finish one or get involved in the community, although I will admit that both endeavours are highly enjoyable.

In the end, the word count swayed me. 20,000 words is a lot less than NaNoWriMo’s 50K goal. At 2,000 words a day — a good writing day — it was reachable in ten days. With my fluctuating writing speed (between 100 words a day and 5,000) it was something I might actually be able to reach by the 30th. The prospect of writing something that wasn’t prose — which all of my writing so far has been — was also an enticement.

I had tried to write a script once before, a half-hour comedy that was in Hindi of all things (typed in English. No, it’s never gone anywhere or shown to anyone, so please don’t adjust your sets). I was pleased with it, but just like short stories aren’t the same kind of writing experience as novels (as several NaNoWriMos have taught me), so 22 minute sitcoms aren’t the same as movies.

Most people have read all the big names when it comes to learning screenwriting — I hear the name ‘Syd Field’ a lot — but I’d only ever read one book by Tom Lazarus (writer of Stigmata). It’s a decent introduction to the world of screenwriting, and is probably more insightful into the process of making a script that fits into the Hollywood world rather than just craft. I hadn’t read it in years, and thumbed through both it and the sitcom script I’d written to refresh my memory for the task ahead.

First, of course, I had to decide what to write.

2. The Problem with Choice

There’s a belief among some people that all writers only have one story to tell, and that all their stories are variations on that one story. We’ve also learned from several Hollywood stories and E! programs that most screenwriters have that one story burning a hole in their heads, that one tale that they’ve been trying to write or are trying to sell, and when sold paves their gold-bricked road to stardom.

I have the opposite problem. I have far too many stories.

While it’s still open for debate on whether or not, in the general sense, they’re all just variations on one story, I have over the years amassed quite the collection of little tales to tell. Let’s start at the beginning; in this case, seven years ago at the dawn of the new millennium, when I first had the kooky idea that I could, at some point, become a proper Writer. I started keeping a little notepad and a pen in my pocket all the time, and whenever I’d think up a story or an interesting thing crossed my mind I’d scribble it down in as few words as possible.

As time went by the notes became a little more elaborate, with their own little codes. Sometimes I’d think of a story and it would seem to me that the story would be best told as a novel, so I’d write down the date, put the code ‘NOV’ next to it and write down the idea. Some became ideas for video games (GAME) and some became comic books (OGN, or ‘original graphic novel’, a term used in that industry). A lot of them started to get the mark ‘MOV’.

Ah, the MOVs. When you start writing you too have heard the myths about the guy with the single great script, the writer with one story, and so you think, “Well, I’ll just be needing one 100 page notebook for my ideas, right? Wrong. Ideas are very easy. You can have half a dozen good ideas for movies and novels in a day, sometimes. If, like me, you don’t ever actually spend the time to write those ideas up as scripts — but you do spend a lot of time laying awake in bed — then chances are those little ideas you jotted down in a moving bus a week ago come back to haunt you, to entertain you, until it’s 4 am and you’ve just played out an entire movie in your head.

I just looked through my files and counted: I kid you not, I have over a hunded and fifty things marked ‘MOV’.

Sure, so some of them, around a dozen or two, are a lot more developed that the others. These are the ones I’ve spent the night playing in my head. I’ve run through them and added in plot points and cleaned them up here and there, so really those are the ones I was most ready to write.

Or was I?

3. The Devil You Know

It was the 1st of June, 2007. I was sitting in a restaurant having lunch with my father and brother. “I have no idea what to write,” I said.

“What do you want to write?” my brother asked.

“Everything!”

I fished out my notebook. My fifth, begun in January; a small 2006 organiser/pocket diary that is useless as a datebook, and I don’t like to waste paper. There were already 30 pages filled. I thumbed through it and picked out the ones marked MOV — a baker’s dozen of recent ideas — and read them aloud to my captive audience. There was a short film about talking breasts (I wonder if people would like that as a feature?). There were a couple of action things that are more style pieces than actual stories. One of them just said ‘Harry Potter. In a Car. Imagine!!’ — I still have no idea what that’s about, or in what half-asleep state I wrote it.

A couple were promising. There was a road movie involving a middle-aged man. The premise was juicy but I didn’t quite know what to do once I hit the halfway mark. As it stood, it was only the bits that would go into a teaser trailer, not a movie. Another one seemed like a fun romp but would require me to write about gangsters. I don’t really like gangsters enough to try and wrestle with them in my first screenplay.

My brother told me I should go with the road movie; it’s set in the real world, simple, and should therefore be easier to get into than some kind of science-fiction/fantasy mammoth. I agreed, but I was not sold yet because of the half-a-plot issue.

Later in the day we met up with my friend Jamie, and while shuffling through Ace Hardware — picking up strange tools and oddly-named bottles with the sole purpose of making lewd jokes about them — I ended up pitching a few of the ideas. I got into a long narration of a story I thought up in 2003. It’s the worst kind of fantasy epic, the trilogy. Worse, it’s a romance, but I figured that if a male in his late teens who plays rock and metal could warm to it, then it might be worth writing. He liked it and pointed out the obvious flaws in the plot, how parts of it just weren’t cool enough, and I agreed with him too.

I was playing it safe even considering that story, of course. This is the screen story that I’ve played the most times in my head, so I pretty-much know all of it start to finish. Also it’s gargantuan, which means I would probably reach 20K long before I would reach the end of the first part, let alone the whole thing.

Therein lay my main problem with it: I want to finish something. I don’t want to hit 20,000 and just put it away half done. I want to write the words ‘THE END. FADE OUT’ by the end of June, and so I was going to have to find something better.

Something better showed up on the 4th of June, an old fantasy idea I’d fleshed out as an outline a year or so before. It’s not as epic as the trilogy, not even as fantastic — there are no large battles involving thousands of CGI horsies and monsters charging at each other — so it would be less of a task than the other one* to write.

(* Actually that trilogy didn’t have any large battles either, but the scale was huge, so you get the idea.)

On the 4th I started writing it and have, so far, reached around the 7 minute mark in screen time, just introducing the world and a few of the main players. Only 2000 words so far, but I haven’t written the juicy bits yet — words flow more freely when you’re writing juicy bits. It’s a very character-driven fantasy, and old-style tale with a modern, mature take. Think Beauty and the Beast with a bunch of twists.

Of course, writing the damn thing was not without its issues.

4. Screenplay Formats and Why I Hate Them

First off, I know that it works, and that in a project where a document will go on to be interpreted by dozens of people including directors, actors, editors, composers, production designers, visual effects people — hell, probably even the caterer — you need a script that’s straightforward and in the format they’re used to so that everyone can — pardon the pun — be on the same page.

My problem with it is that when you’re starting out, when you haven’t yet written the story down and it’s this nebulous cloud of information hovering over your head, spending half your time writing INT-this and (quickly)-that, putting every character’s name in CAPS and every sound effect too, making sure the tabs are right, all gets to be a chore.

The first draft is not a time for you to be worrying about things like that. I could write a million outlines and character notes, but the fact remains that eventually some kind of document must be written that becomes the first draft of the actual screen story, and when that is being written you should be worried about as little as possible, and write as much as you can.

The other problem I have with the traditional screenplay format is that I’m not confident that I can come back to it in, for instance, three months time, and see in it the same things I did when I wrote it. Screenplays are supposed to be as lean as possible; don’t talk about precise hand movements the actors should make, don’t put in camera moves, don’t go on and on about the sets. I, for one, need those things to tell myself the story. I need to put them down just so that they’re out of my head and somewhere else.

That’s why I started off late, on the 4th. I just ditched traditional screenplay format for a freer, more prose-like style. “That’s not a real screenplay, it’s a story,” you’ll say, and you’d be technically right on both points if you want to slavishly and religiously adhere to the ‘industry standard’ definition of a screenplay.

You’d also be wrong, because it’s actually a First Draft.

5. The First and Final Draft

Someone wise once said that the first draft of everything is always shit. You know, they’re right. I have never, so far, ever written the second draft of anything. I am that worst kind of person, the Proud Writer.

The Proud Writer expects everything he writes to be good. The Proud Writer uses the backspace key more than any other, re-typing every sentence he punches in several times until it’s just right. If he’s not getting the right words, then it must be a fault of the cosmos or that he’s ‘just not feeling it’ right now, and he’ll get up from his seat and go away to check his email or watch On The Lot.

The Proud Writer believes with certainty that once the words ‘The End’ are written on something it can never be changed. The Proud Writer is mortally afraid that if he doesn’t get it all perfectly right the first time, it will forever be wrong, wrong, wrong and everyone will somehow know and laugh at him when his back’s turned.

Please kill the Proud Writer within you as soon as you can.

The First Draft is not your story. It’s malleable. It’s soft and squishy and you can keep coming back to it time and again and work it until it’s hard and smooth. Nobody is going to read your First Draft except you. The draft contains ingredients that should go into your story, and it will be missing some and contain stuff that doesn’t belong there, but even if you know that something doesn’t belong there, leave it in.

If you’re tired and not feeling it, continue. The words will be crappy, lazy and boring, but continue. Keep writing. If you’re worried that you’re ruining a perfectly good story by doing this, then let me assure you that you aren’t — after all, this isn’t your story, it’s only the first draft — and continue writing. You will reach a juicy bit and things will get better.

When you do reach that juicy bit and feel the urge to spend some time on it, polishing it up or maybe going back to the older boring bits and working with that — don’t. Do not do that, just continue writing.

I know that you care about your stories — we all do — but as my brother so wisely put it the other day, “There’s a time for caring and a time for writing, and the first draft is a time for writing.”

V

A Temporary Madness

So I’ve gone and ruined my June by signing up for Script Frenzy, a month-long dash from the people who brought you NaNoWriMo. The difference here is that the wordcount is significantly less (20,000) but of course this time it’s not padded, prolix prose we’re all attempting, it’s cut and cleaned movie/stage scripts.

I have no idea why I sign up for these. Perhaps the hallowed memories of ferverishly spending the better part of three days typing non-stop back in Two-Thousand-freaking-One have given me an itch that must be scratched every tme Chris Baty drops me an email (quite what I did to resist it in 2004 I’ll never know). Perhaps it’s so that, should the world come to an end the month after next, well, at least I can say I finished one project I took up.

Either way, I’m in, and I have no idea what I’m going to write. There are tons — quite literally dozens and possibly over a hundred — little notes in my books marked with the code ‘MOV’ that can be turned into scripts. I could also just go in blind as I have done with NaNoWriMo in the past. I’m weighing whether or not I should just pick the biggest, most epicest story I’ve ever come up with. Something else tells me I should aim low — this is my first script — and I should choose somethings small and intimate.

20K seems like a much more accessible goal, but the fact remains that a script and a novel are very different beasts. The one time I’ve attempted to write a script (for a 27 minute sitcom format show) it’s taken a good three days (or around one full day’s worth of hours) to end up with a first draft of around 4,000 words, that too with a partner. Of course, a feature is not constrained by having to squeeze everything into seven minute segments. I really don’t give two hoots about three act structure and Hollywood script norms, so I don’t need to worry too much about it (since nobody’s really going to see the product of this June’s endeavour).

I know I sound like a broken record. This is pretty-much the same post I’ve made every October for the last five years. It seems that I’ve been “getting back into writing” (6 years) longer than I was actively writing in the first place (3 years).

There is, of course, the site, which I also consider writing. It’s imporant for me to be able to not just write fiction. On the other hand the only way I can hypnotise myself into being able to write non-fiction — even in a journal post like this — is to somehow imagine it as fiction. You won’t believe the amount of stuff that gets cut out because it’s me trying to get rid of a talking head. You don’t need to know when I lean back and gesture with the first three fingers of my right hand, because it’s a freaking blog post. I still don’t know why I even stopped calling this a blog… something to do with a technical difference in the backend of the site, I think, plus my sudden need to think of myself as a Writer again.

Two months ago a friend of mine, Jamie, asked — well, demanded — that I write a story that is actually, you know, complete. Being the hot stuff that I am I said, “Sure, I’ll have it done in a week, tell me what you want.” So he did.

I’m currently writing a Savant story — first time in years (no, I’m not counting all the aborted NaNovels) — and it’s got underwater cities and action and cool stuff (as per Jamie’s request). I’m around a 1/3rd of the way through, I think. He has exams starting in around a week’s time, and I have finally started to like what I’m writing, so it’s somewhere around the 8K mark with a possible completion date of this weekend. There are lots and lots of holes in it, but I’m enjoying it now and then.

Over dinner with some friends today the topic of drawing glass objects came up, and how it worked out best when you switched off your mind and just did it. Suddenly you switched back on and a half hour had passed, with you going, “Did I just draw that?”

Believe it or not, it’s the same way with writing. It should be that writing especially would require a person to be aware, pushing that left brain around to form words and sentences that make sense, but it isn’t. I can tell you from firsthand experience that every time I have written something I’m happy with — something good — I have never recalled the process or the time spent.

Switch Off. Switch On. Two thousand words of pure magic in 10pt Verdana, and a satisying ache in the wire of your spine.

Can’t beat that feeling.

And that is why I’m looking forward to June.

“Interview Me!” Meme

The concept is simple. You read one of these posts. You put in a comment at the end that says, “Interview me!” and the author of the post sends you five questions — any five questions — to answer on your own blog or site. Dan answered some, and a bunch of us asked him to interview us (Spyder, Caren and Big Tony have answered already). Click on read more for my answers, which are, as usual, long and hence have to be broken into multiple pages:

1) Other than yourself, do you have an intended audience in mind when you write?

Saying “Everyone!” here would be a bit of a cop out, despite the fact that any human would (I hope) like to exert some kind of positive influence on all other humans (especially hot chicks).

I think I like to write for geeks. I’m especially interested in entertaining polymaths like myself (All polymaths are geeks, but the reverse is not true). I like to write stories that have the particular kind of chaos-embracing, seven-hundred-genres-in-a-single-bound style that I find completely satisfying. I don’t think there’s enough of it, and I’m sure there are others like me who think the same.

It’s a tricky thing to write well, because despite the fact that it very often has something for everybody, the lack of a traditional focus and a religious adherence to the tropes of a genre puts off a lot of people (this is especially annoying in Speculative Fiction genres because, hell, it’s supposed to mess with your preconcieved notions, not stroke it until a dull orgasm is reached).

The paradox of omnifiction — well, omnipunk — is that it’s the smallest genre in the world.

The only genre that has been wrestled by its very nature into being omnifiction friendly is conman and caper stories. All of them involve characters performing tasks of various skills from physical to mental and social.

I love con and caper movies.

2) If a Savant story had a soundtrack, what would it sound like?

Hmm, I think I came up with a songlist around the time I was writing Tale of a Thousand Savants (I think I still have it, …somewhere). It was basically a lot of Japanese Anime and video game soundtracks mixed in with modern Indian pop and other influences. So basically lots of Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoko Kanno and A.R. Rahman.

If I had to describe it now, I would say that like Savant and like the multiverse he plays around in, any soundtrack would have to be complex and varied. It would probably not be angsty (not even when he’s angsty), but it would be soulful. The kind of music that fills you both with joy and wonder. It would embrace genres but experiment, take bits from here and there and put them together in strange, unexpected and wonderful ways. No genre or type of music would be off limits, and no type of music would be treated like a sacred cow.

The three composers I mentioned earlier do exactly that. I find that composers who come from cultures other than the one in which a genre is born and settled, do wonders with it. For example, I think the work of The Teriyaki Boys and The Streets is much more interesting than any American hip-hop I’ve heard. Mitsuda does Celtic stuff with aplomb. A.R.Rahman does wonders with the entire gamut of Indian music (and beyond) because he’s a strange South Indian man with no Pavlovian training in the ‘right way’ to do a bhangra song (also, he’s A.R. Freaking Rahman, and sometimes genius can’t be explained).

3) What inspiration do you most wish Hollywood would take from the Indian film industry?

I wish they’d do things on a smaller budget. Seriously. Have you seen those Dead Man’s Chest DVD extras? Not only do they build a huge marina (a ‘tank’) to shoot boat scenes in, but on another untouched island they built a road across it and shuttle their small city of crew to the other end because the location scouts thought the palm trees looked cool there. Do you really need three hundred people on set to make a movie about a bunch of mangy pirates?

The philosophy in Hollywood seems to be, “Let’s just throw money at it!” rather than actually thinking a shoot through and doing it with the minimal impact. I’m not saying people should be walking two hours to their set, but really, when movies have “million dollar shooting days” something is seriously whacko.

And after all that, they still deliver a movie with no soul whatsoever, which, given all the mucking about with the Caribbean they did, is both a tragedy and exactly what they deserve.

Indian films are nowhere are sophisticated, we have sucky special effects and spotty technical work, but minute for minute I find myself being entertained more by the super-expensive 25 million dollar Indian film than the average budget 125 million dollar American one.

The unfortunate truth is that more Indian movies are starting to follow the Hollywood philosophy of money conquers all, but there are still a good bunch of people around who make nice movies. Also, all the good American movies are the ones made for relatively low budgets, so there is hope there too. Anything Wes Anderson does is bound to be less expensive than the average blockbuster, and is in no way lacking in the imagination and guts departments.

(And yes, I do know that the next Wes Anderson movie is set and shot in India, and I. Can’t. Wait.)

4) You have something of a knack for spotting plot holes and other problems in story structure. What advice would you give writers to help them avoid losing readers like you?

(Until this question was posed I never really thought of myself as being plot and structure sensitive, but after thinking about it — and noting the number of times I’ve discussed it in my old blog entries vis a vis both my own and others’ work — I guess it’s true: I’m a Plot Nazi!)

I’ve reached a point where I can watch a movie as a consumer of cinema parallel to appraising it on a technical level. So while I’m going, “Ooh!” at the latest special effects wizards (and/or Jessica Biel’s behind) I’m also thinking about whether or not the effect is working on a design level, a technical level and so on. I’m not one of those anal retentive people who submit things like, “His finger moves one inch between shots!” to movie mistake sites, but I tend to notice when there’s a sudden drop in pace (Casino Royale), characters behave inconsistently (Dead Man’s Chest), or that the director is masturbating behind the camera (Skull Island and everything after, Peter Jackson’s King Kong).

Weak plot points can be overcome with great characters, so keep your characters doing solid work and people may not notice the rough spots (which there inevitably tend to be). Last year’s Casino Royale did the stupid mistake of not only dropping the pace for no reason whatsoever (preceeding it was a poker game, and it despite being the most boring ‘sport’ in the world next to motor racing, was still written well), but after this drop the characters start spouting the most inane dialogue. Suddenly they’re going all Mills & Boons with cheesy lines about stripping off armour and all that. This is a James Bond movie — you can and should be romantic at times, but at least do it in character!

The Matador is a great example of good characters breezing past a few plot holes and structural inconsistencies with aplomb. So is, on a more magnified level, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Shaun of the Dead is pretty-much perfect and you can study that film to see why it works.

I think in all this seperation of plot, structure and character, I’ve failed to mention that absolutely everything in your story should be treated as these three things. Your protagonist is as much a character as he is the plot and the structure; the latter two are defined and shaped — and will appeal to you audience — based on how much they gel with and seem to be extrapolated from that character. Your world is also more than just a stage to put your stuff in. Describing it, in an indirect and abstract way, also shapes your structure, plot and character. Transmetropolitan and Kieron Gillen’s Phonogram spring to mind.

Most of these aren’t things you can plan ahead, but if you are a writer and have written enough shit you start to have strange hunches and gut feelings that won’t make sense, such as, “My character shouldn’t be eating pie here, he doesn’t like pie.” Stuff like that is your inner supercomputer crunching things far beyond your conscious thought, and you’re well on your way to being better writer.

Or, maybe you’re just a sick bastard who doesn’t like pie.

As far as technical advice is concerned, keep things consistent, first and foremost. If people speak a certain way, have them speak that way unless you wish to use a different style to generate comedy or surprise. Understand that the audience’s imagination doesn’t enjoy being thrown around, and that language is key to that: if your character is in the upper canopy of a tree don’t use language that describes the tree from the bottom up for one line. It immediately puts the mental camera at the ground level and throws the reader out of the story.

Storytelling is a magic trick. You’re using words and language to form pictures and sounds and people and smells in someone else’s head. Any magic trick needs to be well done or it won’t be as effective, even if the audience doesn’t consciously percieve it. The sloppier it is, the more attention your audience is going to pay to the funny lump in your sleeve.

Don’t limit your idea of plot structure to a particular genre. What I’m trying to say here is that you don’t necessarily need to learn all of storytelling by reading more novels. Comics can teach you a whole lot about the economy of storytelling, and both comics and movies can teach you about the way imagery affects perception, about pace. There’s a reason a panel may be seen from an askew angle (it unsettles you without saying “SHOCK!” in big red letters), and a large close up that takes up much of the page can be translated into prose structure as a large, descriptive paragraph.

Storytelling is a lot like graphic design: you’re using the symbology and syntax of a medium to deliver information in a smooth, interesting and pleasing way (while also hopefully being unexpected and engaging).

Songs are a great way to learn plot structure too. I’m not just talking about single guy with guitar wailing about his love life and the state of the world type songs that use polysyllabic words (singer-songwriter stuff as it’s called) — you can get good stories in techno!

A song appeals to us on an abstract level, just like a good story does. Try to take a song and write it as a story, and usually, if you can manage it, there you will find a well-structured plot.

The basic advice here is write, write, write. Everything you write is gold, and everything you write is shit. Look for plot, structure and character in your emails. Observe and try to deduce why some real-world conversations are memorable and entertaining without being in any way literary or theatrical. Sooner or later you’ll be able to tell what in a given story is shit and what is gold, and then rearrange the shit to enhance the look of the gold.

Then you’ll write another story and be back to square one.

Enjoy!

5) Despite already being a skilled polymath (Gosh, thanks!), what talent do you most wish you could add to your repertoire?

This is the kind of question a polymath will never give a single answer to, but off the top of my head I’ll say I’d love to be able to tailor my own clothes. (Being able to sing, super yogic powers or growing my own food were my first answers, but Spyder already beat me to the last one!)

the kids aren’t alright

To say that I am behind in my unofficial nanowrimo effort at this point would be a gross understatement.

I currently stand at word zero.

“What then,” you might ask, “is the excerpt that was just posted before this?”

That, dear reader, is rubbish. In fact, it’s the last straw in a large bale of rubbish, and my novel, like the proverbial camel, lays broken. A little background may be in order:

When I started this novel in 2001 I had the barest of plots, and while I was pretty sure of what was going to happen in the last bits, and over the course of the month I got a grip on the first bits, there was a cavernous mid-section to the novel that was left empty other than a “cool stuff happens” bullet point in the outline.

The novel was always meant to have three or so acts, consisting of however many “Parts” were needed. Act One consisted of Parts 1 and 2, were what was written in 2001, and at the end of November that’s where I stopped. Over the next five years I added around 4-5 thousand words of material to Part 3, the beginning of that difficult mid-section, Act Two.

Some of it you may have read. This was all the bits in the city built on a herd of enormous sauropod-like creatures. Truth be told, I was utterly convinced that this was the direction to take the story in. There was, at the end of Act One, a number of plot points that were floating around in my head that necessitated it. That “cool stuff happens” bullet point now had a bunch of things under it, but most of them did take place towards the end of the Act, and so I figured I might as well continue the damn thing and eventually get to those plot points.

This was the right decision to take at the time. You shouldn’t obsess over the latter sections of a novel when even your first bits aren’t in place (this applies to Acts as well). The problem is that if you haven’t properly comprehended what your first act is about after it’s written — and, in my case, understand more or less what the third and final act will be about — then finding out exactly what that vital bridge between the two acts is, i.e. what the first act should logically flow into while maintaining reader interest, is a tricky thing.

I lost my way. At the end of Act One my characters were preparing for war, their course was set… and Act Two started with them waiting two months for an appointment with a spiritual leader. It was interesting to write — certainly bureaucracy and diplomacy are parts of any war (at least they were on Star Trek), and much of the material written helped me define those plot points at the end of Acts Two and into Three a lot better, but this was really not the right direction to go.

You do end up writing a lot of crap when you’re doing a novel’s first draft. Entire chapters will and should be removed later, but they’re there for a reason the first time. When you’re writing a story you’re discovering it as much as you are inventing it, and walking down a blind alley or two can teach you much.

So, therefore, if you are one of the few unlucky souls who have read the first draft and actually remember the bits with the walking dinosaurs, well, that bit isn’t in the story anymore.

This does not, however, mean that I don’t know where to take the story. A re-evaluation of all those plot points and mechanics and other randowm things, plus a good, hard look at Act One and what it was trying to do, has helped me find a better direction for the story. An outline has been written for a chapter, it interests me, it excites me, and when I finish writing this post I’m off to flesh it out with big words and stuff. There are no long waits, no bureaucracy, no unending bits about how boring life in the army is.

The camel isn’t broken anymore, it’s just lost a bit of fat, and is back on its feet.

There’s no guarantee that even this new material is safe — I might find that it doesn’t work and I’ll toss it much like the last one. This much, however, I can guarantee:

Cool Stuff Happens.

Happy Writing,
V

chapter 19 excerpt

Sometime close to dawn, Sculler was snoring away in his bunk, half of his right leg slung over the side. He was snoring twice as loudly as a person who’d just come off a double shift of guard duty should. Some of the other troops had taken bets on whether he had, on purpose, cast a spell on himself to amplify the volume of his snores; simply his move in the latest round of the little chess game of pranks and practical jokes that he, as youngest, was frequently subject to.

The fact that he outranked them didn’t matter much — off duty (and sometimes on), Park’s motley little family would revert to a blissful state of anarchy. Impromptu parties and bizarre sporting events were frequent on Pippoo, and as the noise of them grew the city elders of Eule had quietly and subtly increased the distance between the little one with his raucous inhabitants, and the rest of the city’s beasts. It was said, however, that on a breezy night, one could still gear the sound of a trepkila (a kind of local trumpet that Captain Roseweaver had picked up) blaring away even in the farthest reaches of the city.

Lieutenant Drainpipes (who had the dubious record of having punched every single new soldier transferred into the squad, only because all Savants think alike and every one of them asked, “Can I take a look at your pipes sometime?” seconds after meeting her) groggily raised her head from her pillow as Sculler let rip a particularly loud one. She scowled at him in the dark and lay down again, stuffing the pillow over her ears. As she drifted back to sleep she also regretted betting against the magical amplification theory.

“Funny,” she mumbled, “It’s almost getting softer…”

She was right, but that was only because two shadowy figures had snuck in and abducted Sculler in his sleep.

say it with me now…

eep.

It’s already technically the 2nd, and I haven’t written a word.

eep.

chicken scratch and crazy lines


Finished the basic geometry on Baby Catchers. The colours are all over the place and are very, very temp. I just needed them as reference to keep all the shapes straight in my head. I can’t work in a line-only mode over a long period. Here, take a look at the uncoloured lines:

I do start my work on each character with unfilled shapes. I’m generally good enough at working with vectors to be able to, like here, do all the shapes for a single character and then go about filling them from a library of colours I’ve already used elesewhere in the image.

Once I have basic geometry, like here, I can go back in, decide on which character needs the most detailed shading (Savant here needs the most, since he overlaps many characters and actually touches things like Scullers face, which is lost because of the similar colours at this stage), and which ones need to be left simple (other than stripes and a few embellishments to his armour, Roseweaver will be kept simple since he’s in the background).

Overall, I need to hammer down the colour pallette now. I’m not very happy with the colours on the coats, skin tone’s okay, Roseweaver’s colours are hideous. Then comes the detailing, and finally lighting and atmosphere. In many ways, working in vector is a lot like working in a 3D program: you start off with basic geometry and then your move on to texturing and lighting.

On the novel front, I’ve decided to do it the old old fashioned way and actually write it with a pen and paper. My handwriting sucks. I pretty-much stopped once I left school (no real reason, just moved to a computer for most work and never really needed it), and I’m really out of shape. Never written fiction like this, so I’m very unsure about the pace. Typing on the computer is sort of more my speed — I can type about as fast as I think (i.e. not very fast) — but writing it may a little slow even for me.  Oh well, have to try, and it might as well be now.

Also been thinking of going back and actually reading what I wrote 5 years ago. Maybe make a few changes in light of newer plot ideas, but nothing major. Yeah, going cold into the second part of a novel is probably not the best idea. I don’t want to have it all finished up and then realise I killed* some character 5 years ago who inexplicably forms the lynchpin of my cool new plot**.

* – I don’t think I’ve killed anyone….
** – There is no cool new plot.

So, more colouring will take place, and maybe even some writing. Anyone want to read short cast and crew bios and stuff?

PS. Large version of the above image here:

baby steps


Started colouring the Tale of a Thousand Savants “Baby Catchers” image. I’m doing this using the kickass (open source) vector graphics program called inkscape, mostly because I like the clean look of vector art and the logical, editable-at-any-time collage-like nature of the workflow. Also, I haven’t loaded in the drivers for my graphics tablet since I switched to XP on the work comp, so doing something like this in the GIMP would be be harder, especially given my horrible bitmap painting skills.

I started out by doing basic colours on the baby. The way I handle these is usually I put down basic outlines, boolean new shapes for specific things like hands and feet that I know will require their own shading later, and then flat-colour them with mid-tones. The colours are usually borrowed directly from my last image (things like skin tones and such) and are temporary — it’s just something to look at while you work. Once I’ve done the whole image in flats to my satisfaction, and I’m happy that the colour range is not all over the place, I go back in and draw and boolean shadow and highlight shapes for characters and objects. After that it’s a matter of adding in things like lighting gradients and object shadows, patterns and texture, adjusting colours etc.

This time I’ve decided to put in simple gradients from the get-go, and the results are not bad. Depending on how the image looks once everything is coloured like this, I may decide not to make the shadows and highlights as solid shapes (as I usually do) and only go with gradients. The results will look much softer. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

On the novel front, I chalked out a basic outline of what needs to happen over the next few bits. Right now I get the feeling that it’s a little too scattered, that — in a bullet-point form anyway — there seems to be a lot of running from here to there and sidequests. Of course, all of this may just go out the window once I’m actually writing, and that, believe it or not, is a good thing, i.e. it’s good when your novel tells you how it wants to be written.

Also, I can fix any number of things in second draft, if I ever get there (let’s just worry about finishing the first, okay? I’m already 5 years late!). Meanwhile, colouring continues. I’m wondering if I should go from front to back (Savant being at the front, and therefore first) or rear to front (Kaja being the least defined and in the BG, hence requiring less work). Probably the latter. Like novel-writing, every illustration needs a certain amount of time where you aren’t enjoying it and you keep plugging away at it until you start to hit your stride. Until this happens your work can be sloppy and unfocussed. I’d much rather be bored with a background character than to have to come back later and clean up shoddy work on my main character.

Writing, illustration: it’s all the same, really.

the boys are back in town


Five years ago this November, I started writing my first novel, after having written fiction actively for around a year and a half. It was called The Tale of a Thousand Savants, written for the yearly nanowrimo mass, um, thing, and like the illustration above, was never finished. I enjoyed starting it, and I enjoyed plugging away at it for the first ten days of the month, but soon I was going nowhere and personal issues cropped up that made writing a frivolous fantasy romp the last thing I wanted to do. By the end of the month I was still somewhere around 9K words, and with the deadline of December 1 rapidly approaching I was all set to give up on it.

And then a funny thing happened. I started to write. A lot. In the last four days of the month the word count went up to 34K, still far short of the 50K finish line, but nonetheless far more than I had ever written on anything, an perhaps equaling my entire output of short fiction until then. It was utterly crap, and not spell-checked (Dan and Spyder can attest to this), but somewhere along the way I had found my characters and the thing just started to write itself.

Unfortunately, those four days gave way to what has now become five years of slow, then non-existent writing output. This past year even my overall creative output has dropped to near zero (I must shamefully admit here that Dan and Spyder can attest to this fact too). I miss being myself. I miss writing, because, frankly, for those two or so years — and those four days in particular — I felt, I knew, that this was what I was meant to do. This was right.

In the past few years I’ve tried — usually around every November during nanowrimo — to kickstart my stalled writing again, but while the projects have shown promise, the writing itself felt laboured and dead.

Now I am, quite literally, at the end of my creative rope, and, as they say about low points, there’s nowhere else to go but up. So, this November I’m going to return to the project that helped me find myself five years ago. It’s a continuation of a novel, so I can’t in good conscience say it’s going to be a part of the official nanowrimo event, but I am going to give it my best shot and write at least 50,000 words in the month.

I doubt that will finish the novel. By my estimate, what I have so far is only around 1/3rd of the plot, but I’ll get there eventually. Some time before that, this picture will be ‘finished’ (i.e. coloured and polished). For now, here’s a larger version of the sketch.


Excerpts and character bios will be going up whenever I write them, and will be posted here. Let’s see how this turns out. Bring your Mars bars.

just say nano

I got one of those nanowrimo emails again. Argh, I’m tempted. Very tempted.
Considering that I haven’t written fiction for a looong time, and that
I haven’t written fiction with the frequency needed to tackle nanowrimo
well in an even longer time, plus a bunch of other stuff that is
pending work-wise, I really should not. No. Don’t do it, Vishal. No.

Aaaaaarrrrrggggh.