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Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
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1:37 am - Sex Meme
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Well, I can take credit for the idea, but it arose out of a conversation with me and mofic and she's infinitely better at follow-through, so the design is hers.
Do please take it, and pimp it as well. I think it will lead to LOTS of interesting conversations, and in January, I need something besides the weather report to argue about!
http://www.livejournal.com/poll/?id=1120155
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1:32 am - Plot and character 101
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Distinguishing between Plot and Character Driven: or from the character-driven POV: Knowing your characters, and letting them be themselves
At the heart of the “plot-driven” vs. “character-driven” discussion is one fundamental fact: characters change.
Disregarding more-or-less experimental and “slice of life” stories, the basic, traditional, literary rule is that a character grows in some way – ideally, more than one, in a longer story or novel. The first writing question, then, is “how does my protagonist change?” Keep that in mind. I'm still working on how people know your characters enough to tell when someone changes, so we'll get back to that another day.
This doesn’t mean you can't focus on action most of the time. Adventures change any of us. There’s a very large body of male coming-of-age stories where the young man joins the army/navy/air force and goes to war. What he experiences changes him. From the Red Badge of Courage to Apocalypse Now, what he learns is the writer’s choice, but he learns. The most valued stories for academic selection are character-driven.
Stray commented to me when we were first talking about plot and character that she came up with the incidents and then tried to fit her characters into that. I think she was surprised when I said “I noticed.” But most readers do notice when writers do that; they just haven’t had the training to articulate what they’re noticing.
If you think of a story as Art, you won't necessarily care about what an audience wants, or at least admit to caring. One of the important truths in workshops is that stories are always affected by who the writer wants to read and approve of it. This is seldom addressed directly. It's the story itself, the artifact, which needs to exist and mean something. It "finds its audience." ( Read more... )
Next time, Plot and Character 102, with more examples from real life process. Writers invited to chime in here with examples, please!
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1:21 am - Introduction: Why I'm Committing Writing Heresies
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Note: this is a series I've started on LJ and have just gotten around to posting here. Someday I'll wave my magic wand and it'll be posted both places. I will post my fics here next week.
I promised a friend -- Stray, whom I will be mentioning -- to write a series of informational somethings on centralizing character. When I started doing it, I realized that I could definitely only speak from my personal writing experience. So this is NOT canon, academic or otherwise. The only reason I know something about this is that I started out in the academic literary world -- in fact, I went to Iowa for the MFA, which is something like going to Harvard for law school only more prestigious among an international crowd of writers. It's like the Superbowl: there are spectators who watch the competition, there are competitors, there are predictions on things like MVP for the year, and then there are after-game wrap-ups when people die and their credentials are reviewed. Oh yes, and every year people get hurt.
What Iowa does NOT necessarily produce is a lot of writers most people have ever heard of. It does NOT produce a lot of fiction writers or poets I enjoy reading -- because of my taste, not their brilliance or lack thereof. While a couple of writers at least every year go on to be highly successful for novels like Field of Dreams or the Last Confederate Widow Tells All or The World According to Garp, mostly you see their names in college, when your Modern Literature teacher assigns you a list of novels that You Should Read and you (if you're like me) obediently do for the first 50 pages or so and then get bored, and sneak back to the Internet or the Mystery or Science Fiction or Romance section of the bookstore or library.
Then I took workshops at the Loft, a local writers' nonprofit community, which is not academically based and most predictably has writers who have sold novels and intend to sell more. Their fiction is therefore commercial at base, not academic, and it affects their view, including what makes the quality of the story. Every single workshop leader focused on what a publisher is looking for, and how to get it to them. Audience, in short, is essential. And there is no intrinsic assumption, as there is for academic writers, that the text itself is, or ought to be, Art.
Fanfic was a third place I've had some experience and (very little) training. Here, my training has mostly been reading writers I admire and what they think about writing. The problem is that I'm pretty sure most of them were academically trained, so they're great writers, but I'd like someday to see them comment on their differences from ones who usually come out of the academy. I'll be talking about fanfic writers and how I see them as different from either academic or commercially-driven writers somewhere along here, but it's not precisely relevant at the moment to the things Stray wants to know.
Okay, now I've got my academic traditional introduction -- ie introducing myself according to my credentials -- I'm not going to talk about that anymore. It doesn't matter much if I were the successful one or not by their standards. For one thing, my MFA's in poetry. There is NO commercial market for poetry. The nearest to it is getting published enough by the right people that you'll get offered a steady job teaching writing. It's like getting an academic scholarship for playing football; sort of secondary in a career sense. (And why I'm stuck on football metaphors tonight is a complete other question.)
The reason I talked about credentials, btw, is I'm going to be slamming academic literary values, or perceived as doing so, here and there, and I want to make it clear I'm doing that as an insider with a lot of years learning the culture and expectations first.
Okay? Great. Next Post is on character-driven vs. plot-driven,inspired really by a comment from an sf writing workshop leader years ago. Do hang on; it's going to be a bumpy ride.
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| Thursday, September 6th, 2007
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7:18 pm - Watcher at the Gates
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A kind friend chatted with me early this morning (2 a.m. my time, 3 a.m. hers) about writing, feeling stuck, and such. In the conversation (which helped a LOT! Thanks, GN!) She mentioned Gail Godwin's "Watcher at the Gates," which I hadn't run into for reasons that are obscure to me.
Every writer should read this and then do homework around it: Who's my watcher? Why is s/he there? How can I keep the Watcher happy and quiet except when it's appropriate?
The essay is printed on the web various places. I did a search and found it on Ellen Kushner's LJ, and decided to make that my link. Ellen's a very fine writer (Swordspoint, etc.) and just in case you haven't encountered her work, it was another excuse to introduce you to someone good! The second paragraph begins the essay.
( Read more... )
current mood:  accomplished
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| Thursday, August 30th, 2007
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12:37 am - Cross post tagging
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Okay, I got tagged with this meme which seems to be going the rounds, judging from my f-list -- which dramatically lowers the number of people I can tag, alas! Thanks, ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) realpestilence! Grrrrr. *secretly happy to be tagged; feels like a real lj person*
Here are the rules:
1. List seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself.
2. Tag seven people to do the same.
3. Do not tag the person who tagged you or say that you tag whoever wants to do it.
Tag: twistedm,faithfulreader,grey_hunter,mofic,scoradh,differente, and a 7th person I need to email first...
Obviously if any of those DON'T want to share, feel free not to, and the reason I'm asking people who don't know me well is -- I don't really know you either, and thought this would be a good excuse to find out. If you just want to keep reading and writing fic, I understand -- it's what I do.
( Read more... )
Update (above cut for people who are on IJ, who may want to know). I absentmindedly just cut and pasted for my crosspost, then realized I'd done the html for lj cut=. I want in to look at it, expecting the usual "Fatal Error" sort of thing, and discovered that IJ had managed to interpret and change the html w/o any help from me at all! So you folks who DON'T have paid accounts which format for you, you don't have to learn a set of html commands for each... I'm hoping the "lj cut" command works too...
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| Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007
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11:07 pm - On Coming Out as a Slasher
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Crossposted to LJ
I do apologize to anyone just looking for fic, but I'm not putting this under an lj cut. I seldom feel what I have to say is worth making an lj entry for -- the internet has enough opinions I wouldn't be surprised to find mine elsewhere, word for word, before I wrote it -- but LJ and the issue of keeping below the radar came together for me, and I think we need to consider what ducking and covering might do or fail to do.
A long, long ago, (Monday?) in a journal far, far away, I started to bend my mind to the Second Great LJ Strikeout. Emma Grant wrote how much endangered slash writers are, and how such foolish things as complaining about censorship to the California Attorney General, as someone on my f-list did, is a bad idea and makes everything worse for the rest of us, because once we are noticeable, no one will be on our side.
I love Emma's writing, both fictional and otherwise, and I read her journal as often as possible. I've almost always agreed with her. This is the first time I cocked my head and then started shaking it.
At the time, it just struck me how very, very close her reasoning was to the same arguments I and my partner encountered some years ago. We were in a relationship with each other, and up to that time we had both believed ourselves completely heterosexual. (I still think of myself that way; she was a glitch in my history; so now I throw in the phrase, "other than S, I've always been attracted to males.") But because we had built our social and personal relationships in a broad community, we saw no reason NOT to be out. In Des Moines, Iowa, in 1992, this made us literally 2 of about 5 people in the entire city who were publicly not heterosexual -- and the only ones raising a kid together. Also the only out female couple. By out, I mean we were willing to have our pictures in the paper, be quoted as "lesbian moms," etc. I don't mean out in the gay community -- actually, we weren't especially (they didn't know who we were, mostly, except all the other moms) until we stood up in front of a hundred and fifty screaming, jeering, swearing bible thumpers ("God hates you -- read this!") and told them we had a kid in the school system and were just as much parents as anyone else.
Then of course we became poster children and prime exhibits for Why It's Okay for Normal People to be Out. And the recipients of quiet phone calls from mothers who weren't out, for the best of reasons -- fear they'd lose their jobs, their housing, and their children -- and wanted to talk about that, or thank us.
It's a long story. If anyone expresses interest, I'll tell more of it. But that's sufficient, I think, to show my credentials on what being "out" is about, and what it feels like to be physically in danger because of it.
I've got others -- I was involved in various people's civil rights and liberation movements since I was 13 and got dragged in by my best friend to picket a local Safeway for selling non-union grapes. And every single experience, and all my social movements research, has led me to the conclusion: You will never change the conditions of your servitude until you go public. In the process you will annoy people and both you and they will be uncomfortable. But if someone pushes you out of your comfort zone, go thank her for doing so.
I've been paying a lot of attention to class issues in this community -- well, class among other privilege, such as age, physical attractiveness, heterosexual privilege, etc. I hate the thought of moving to IJ myself -- I just got to know a few people, finally got a couple actually reading something I write in the way of fiction, and now I have to build a niche AGAIN? I've done that too much in rl -- moving to strange schools, strange cities, etc. -- to want to do it on the internet.
But compared to someone burning down your garage with both cars in it, or even just throwing eggs at your door, I feel rather guilty for wanting the status quo and to stay on LJ.
Corporations are evil, by their nature. Their bottom line is not human beings, but profit, and its material benefits to people who own stock. It should be no surprise when they behave as they're supposed to behave, and deprive a minority of their rights in order to maximize profits. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN WE SHOULD LET THEM DO IT. I was an organizer. And the first rule of organizing is: fight back -- to hold people accountable for their actions, and hold the feet of those with power to the fire till it's more unpleasant to ignore us than to listen to us.
So I applaud EVERYONE who complained to the AG, or sent emails of complaint, or encouraged people to move to other journals, or just fomented dissatisfaction in their own lj's. It's the only way to make change. It's unlikely to be big change -- but feeling the financial pain is how you make corporations back off. I have often wondered why fen don't organize and boycott the owners of the products we like -- STOP buying models, collectibles, etc. when they start harassing a group of fen for whatever. I think most people in fandom know that we actually generate desire to see the films/tv/books, buy the cute little action figures, and be the good commercial audience they so desire. That's why their control patterns conflict with themselves -- they want to keep the phenomenon, but intervene in the way it manifests itself.
I depend on the internet for my social and intellectual life the way many of us with limited incomes and local resources do. That means I'm just not going to go as far to fight for free speech as I would for those basic human rights I mentioned -- a job, a home, and a family. But for people who have their economic needs met, and want to push? Bravo. Let me know how I can help. Shove a petition in front of me, and I'll sign it.
And then I'll go back to the most recent story about my OTP, and cross my fingers, serene in the knowledge that the internal contradictions of capitalism means there'll always be an internet.
current mood:  aggravated
current music: The voices in my head, as always
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| Sunday, August 19th, 2007
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7:43 pm - Blast.
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Hmmm. Animated it's not. At least for me. And clearly I'll have to make another entry just to be clear where my loyalties lie.
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7:39 pm - First post
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And I have to admit, it's just so that I can see if what Stray did for my new icon works....
current mood:  excited
current music: Only in my head.
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