5 Things I hate about my own writing...

2012-11-09T09:36:00.001-08:00

Honesty is essential in any relationship, and it's no different with a writer and his work. So let us have some honesty today, in no particular order...

1. My fucking characters, often run over my plot developments like SF giants fans run over buses. They can and will do whatever they feel like, and I have very little I can do about it.

2. Sometimes I get preachy. Let's be honest, we all do it. The only thing I can do is let it all out like a frat boy purging 12 hours of PBR and then spend half a day pruning it. I'm supposed to write a story, not editorialize.

3. In The Misadventures of Edward Clarke, my narrator was an 18th century asshole who has a very formal way of speaking, but he kept using phrases over and over again. Phrases like "...all manner of...", you know, when he saw lots of stuff. I kept cutting it out and he kept saying it; the twit.

4. Outlines make me bored. Seriously, making an outline is like taking an ambien. I tend to internalize more then write stuff down and then take notes after I write to make sure I'm staying on course. It is backward yes, but I'm a backward sort of thinker I suppose.

5. When I get writer's block, I don't force myself to keep writing until it works. I blog instead...

Is Twitter good for writers?

2012-11-08T16:16:00.002-08:00

When you're writing a piece and every sentence must be 'just so' is it possible that typing tweets, and trying to convey as much information as possible in 140 characters or less, a sense of economy is needed. In this way, perhaps twitter is making people better communicators. It's an interesting thought.

Method Writing: Voice

2012-11-08T11:51:00.001-08:00

A little advice to myself today...

That intangible thing Voice, can be the most infuriating part of the writing process, you can put the words in the order you want, you can edit it and wring it and step on it, but if the voice isn't there, you may not be saying what you want to at all.

My own personal preference on dealing with this, is to write conversationally, pretend as if your audience is there with you and you're having a nice chat while you spin a yarn for them over a couple of beers. Think about how you speak to a real live person. What would you say, how would say it? Pay attention to the cadence the words make as they bounce along in the narrative. Words can create a melody in the readers mind, don't ignore a single note of it.

My zen moment for the day, while I scribble a few words on my next manuscript...

Much Ado About Shakespeare

2012-09-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare.

It is a name that for over 400 hundred years, has been synonymous with genius and literary excellence, though for the average person, it might be hard to define why. It simply is, because it is so. I admit, that even I have had difficulty trying to define what it is that I meant to say with this essay on popular culture. Perhaps, Shakespeare is so obvious a figure in popular culture; it becomes difficult to pinpoint the actual reason for it. Shakespeare isn’t simply a writer in the popular conscience of society; he’s one of the architects of it.

I realize that Shakespeare isn’t the most comfortable of subjects for many of us. Who hasn’t felt their tongue swell at the alien words written centuries ago, when called upon in a high school English class? This first and perhaps most important introduction to the works, is often misguided, because the works of William Shakespeare were never meant to be read mechanically from a text book, they are plays, the inflection of the lines and the emotions upon the faces of the actors, just as important as the words themselves. It’s no wonder Shakespeare is regarded with such reticence. Yet the man and his works endure, a right of passage for all students and a life long passion for scholars. But, Why?

Typing the word Shakespeare into ‘Google’, produces over 79 million hits. No, I didn’t look at all of them, but the shear number is staggering. He has 898 writing credits listed on the movie and television database IMDB.com, the first being a 15 minute short of Macbeth produced in 1898 and the latest being a feature length version of King Lear set for release in 2013. Take that in for a moment. For over a hundred years Shakespeare and his stories, have been one of the most popular subjects in cinema, with many of his plays being produced on film multiple times and adapted in multiple ways.

These adaptations come in various forms like the musicals West Side Story and Kiss Me Kate, based upon Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew, to the Japanese film Ran, based upon King Lear(Shakespeare), to the teen comedy Ten Things I hate about You , also based on Taming of the Shrew. They run the gambit from the high-minded drama, to the tawdry and many of the greatest actors have played Shakespeare’s characters, such as Anthony Hopkins and Laurence Olivier and showcased raw talent like Natalie Wood and Heath Ledger, two actors who had very Shakespearian ends.

So it isn’t just that the material Shakespeare represents influences us, but the incubation of talent that it affects and in return affects us all. Recently Joss Wedon director of the blockbuster movie “The Avengers”, had this to say about Shakespeare:

“There’s a reason Tony Stark makes fun of Thor, and mentions Shakespeare in the Park in The Avengers,” said Whedon. “It’s great to play high drama and comedy alongside a modern story. Shakespeare was shameless about that stuff, pop culture references.”

The works of Shakespeare bleed into mainstream cinema, and shapes our opinions of drama and action. In the last four centuries, there isn’t a man or woman who picked up a pen or stepped onto the stage, that hasn’t been influenced or compared to William Shakespeare.

The cinema aside think of how a play like Romeo and Juliet has effected the way young people see and expect love to be. Raw, without inhabitation, dynamic and violent. What young man hasn’t wanted to play the Romeo? What young woman hasn’t imagined herself, standing on a balcony, being compared to the sun? That’s what young love is, the expectation of an unbridled passion that is, in most cases, ultimately going to fail, though perhaps not in an accidental duel suicide.

The very heart of the Shakespeare canon and the reason for his importance, is his ability to proposefully and insightfully marshal a specific group of archetypes that are recognizable today. The Star-crossed lovers of Romeo and Juliet, the powerless old man in King Lear, the political meanderings of MacBeth and Iago of Othello, the desperation of Hamlet and Richard the Third, the football coach, his team down at half-time, channeling Henry the Fifth, rallying his “Band of Brothers", beseeching them, “Once more into the breech.” All of these characters and more can be found in every book, every play, every movie, they are the very foundations of characterization and thus the foundations for characters we play in real life, after all, anyone in the 21st century can rally around the statement:

“All the world’s a stage, all the men and women merely players: They have their entrances and their exits; And one man in his time plays many parts.”

This is the very definition of the reality entertainment based society, in which a college student in Chico can upload a video on Youtube of himself belching the bill of rights, and it can be viewed in Cairo by a street vendor on his smartphone. The stage is the same size but the audience is bigger, and in that way Shakespeare’s place amongst us will continue to grow.

This is the world that Shakespeare envisioned through his plays and the one that he built for us. A world still struggling like Count Orsino in ‘Twelfth Night’, with feelings on homosexuality, a world where the black moor Othello can marry the white venetian princess Desdemona for love. His words gave us the bricks and we’re still finding the correct places for them.

In the end, it’s not about the words he wrote, but about the spirit that he tried to invoke with them. Life, as art, words as a way to communicate compassion and love, endings that aren’t always happy, but still satisfying. That is as real and true as it gets and the reason why Shakespeare still resonates four centuries after his death. As the playwright and Shakespeare contemporary Ben Jonson said of the man “He was not of an age, but for all time.”

PLATO IN RAGS

5 Things I hate about my own writing...

Is Twitter good for writers?

Method Writing: Voice

Much Ado About Shakespeare