In January 2020 I set myself some writing writing goals. Let’s look at how I was doing on those before, you know, that thing happened.
Continue reading “Writing Goals for the Post-Pandemic World”Writing Goals for the Post-Pandemic World
Finding Motivation to Write During Hard Times with 4thewords
Well hello again.
Like many others, my writing productivity has suffered during the pandemic. I went from having mornings free of kids to pursue my writing (and physical therapy) to suddenly supervising four kids learning at home. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one.) It was stressful and many times it was all I could do to get the kids through their school work in the morning and spend the rest of the day on the couch, obsessively reading Google News and Facebook.
After a month or two, I started building a foundation that allowed me to come out of hibernation. Honestly, I was forced to. I had agreed in February to write a blog post due in June, and my deadline was fast approaching. I had to find some way to come out of my funk and get some kind of work done.
Continue reading “Finding Motivation to Write During Hard Times with 4thewords”Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury
Observations from reading a collection of stories by a science fiction master
Confession: I haven’t read short stories since graduating from college.
This is probably not much of a shock to you. Unless you are a writing professional, you probably don’t read short fiction either. Novels really are the prevailing art of the day. But I’ve been trying to get back into them because they let you see a whole idea very quickly. I will never be able to read as many books as I wish I could, especially since I read so many genres. But with short stories, I can at least get a taste of what an author is like.
A great tool for this has been the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. I recommend it to everyone. It’s like Reading Rainbow but for grownups! And the vast majority of the stories fall into the SFF genre, so I’m getting exposed to a lot of authors I wouldn’t have time for otherwise.
But I set a goal to read one whole collection by a classic SFF author this winter. I wanted to really understand what one author was about without having to spend a year reading their whole backlist. I picked Ray Bradbury merely because I was looking for authors who had written about time travel, and his story “A Sound of Thunder” is, as far as I know, the origin of the butterfly effect as used in fiction.
Well, turns out most of his other stories are not about time travel, but I did enjoy reading A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury. Some of my observations from the collection:
Continue reading “Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury”Story Genius and Frozen 2: When the Story Doesn’t Match the Plot
As part of my winter writing goals, I’ve been reading Story Genius by Lisa Cron. Though it has its flaws (assuming that all stories are character driven instead of just most of them), I’m enjoying the thorough take on how to construct a character arc for your story before you start writing. My NaNo novel definitely suffered from a lack of planning in this department–I stalled out 1/3 of the way through because I had no idea how to pull the character out of her depressed funk. So I feel like the lessons learned in this book will be helpful in getting my next book going.
Story Genius also helped me with a problem that’s been rolling around in my head: why I don’t like Frozen 2. Ever since watching the movie over Thanksgiving, I’ve been wondering why a movie with such ostensibly powerful messages ended up feeling so hollow for me. I think Story Genius has given me the answer: what Frozen 2 wants to say, the story it wants to tell, isn’t backed up or earned by the plot that we see on screen. Sure, the songs are fantastic (you can’t fault Frozen on lyrics), and there are some great empowering one liners, but these end up falling flat because there is no substance behind them. It doesn’t come off as believable character growth, which means that it just comes off as a preach fest with lyrical interludes.
And so, without further ado, my attempt to fix the character arcs in Frozen:
Continue reading “Story Genius and Frozen 2: When the Story Doesn’t Match the Plot”Turning Darkness into Light: What genre is this and how do I get more of it?
In some ways, I think that my love of Marie Brennan grows out of my love of Brandon Sanderson. The magic in Sanderson’s books is famously logical and scientific. In Mistborn, there are 16 metals and they all have a specific power which is bounded in its possibilities. Warbreaker has a particularly economic magic system where each person has a set amount of magic (“breath”) and in order to get more, you have to literally take someone else’s. In these worlds, you as a reader understand what is possible, the inputs and outputs. The “magic” of the book comes from the clever manipulation of these given tools to solve problems.
Marie Brennan’s series The Memoirs of Lady Trent takes this a step further. Dragons are simply an animal, a creature like any other, and that’s it. There’s no magic, no wizards, only a question of what would it look like if early Enlightenment natural philosophers were studying dragons instead of, well, whatever less cool animals they studied. In spite of the dragons on the covers, the plot of each of the five books is much less about fantastical elements or accomplishing some unknown feat than it is about travelling to an area, doing careful research and observations, perhaps some experiments, and then drawing conclusions from that about the biology and history of the world.
Her new book Turning Darkness into Light is the next logical step. Not only is there no magic or saving the world, but there are hardly any dragons at all, except in the myth that the main scholars are translating. That’s actually the main action of the novel: three people in a room trying to decipher an ancient text and understand the impact it will have on the world. Granted, one of them is a draconean, but his exotic nature matters mostly in his relationship to the text and what he has at stake because of it.
And yet Brennan manages to make this fascinating. Some ways that I think this works:
Continue reading “Turning Darkness into Light: What genre is this and how do I get more of it?”