Tag Archives: creative

December 10, 2011 · 6:27 AM

The Zebras have Landed

I was bored yesterday, so I decided to try and write that short story I promised you.  I opened up a Word document, typed the title at the top of the page – Extracurricular Activities for Zebras – and then proceeded to stare at the blank screen.  I stared for a while, tried to type something, hated it, tried to revise, and hated that, too.  Then I decided it might be interesting to make the story about the conversation that led to me getting that fantastic title.  That idea seemed nice, and it sort of evolved from there.  The finished result was a work of Creative Nonfiction, and I’m actually very happy with it.  So today’s post is that short story.  No cartoons or witticisms today.  So, without further ado, I give you my short story:

Extracurricular Activities for Zebras

Fellow students asked me why I left sunny Los Angeles for Syracuse, New York.  My response was always the same – Because I wanted to see snow for the first time.  And this would shock them, and we’d get to discussing other things, and they’d never figure out I was lying.  I’d seen snow before.  Once, my dad took me and my siblings skiing.  But the snow there was manufactured.  Snow machines.  But we did drive up to the mountains once, and that snow was real.  It just wasn’t fresh.  I’d never seen snow falling, never lived in a place where snow was considered normal.  So I lied, but it wasn’t a really big or malicious lie.  It just simplified things.

My mom asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  When I was younger, I replied with things like “veterinarian” and “doctor,” because I liked animals and… I don’t remember my reasons for wanting to be a doctor.  Mom told me that I might have trouble with that since both vets and doctors have to see blood.  I’d forgotten that detail.  Being a very squeamish person, I knew I’d never be able to go down either of those career paths.

What surprised me in middle school, and then high school, was that I was still tempted to add “when I grow up” to the end of any sentence that began, “I want to be a…”  And then I wondered when exactly we can be considered grownups.  When is it okay to stop saying “when I grow up” and acknowledge that you already have?  I assumed it would happen when I actually got the career I was hoping for, and then I could say, “Now I am a _____.  Now I am grown up.”  But when you’re sixteen and saying “when I grow up,” well, that just doesn’t sound right.  Except, if you don’t say it, then the sentence feels incomplete somehow, so I stumbled over the words.  “I want to be a teacher when I – well, not when I grow up.  Just when I get older, I guess.”

My college applications asked me what my hobbies were outside of the classroom.  I told the truth: I played the clarinet, rode horses, sketched, wrote stories.  But that still left a lot of blank space, like I wasn’t fulfilling their expectations.  What more could I say?  My life was consumed by school.  When I wasn’t in school, I was doing homework.  When I wasn’t doing homework, I was too tired to do anything else.

My stepmom asked me why I feared blue eyes.  I was baffled.  Didn’t everybody?  No?  Huh.  I had no answer for her.  To this day, I have trouble looking people in the eye, and it’s even worse if the other person’s eyes are blue.  But at least I know the reason now.  After pondering the question, I had this little jolt of memory.

I remembered the first place where I took riding lessons.  No, that’s not true.  It was technically the second.  When I was very little, my mom signed me up for pony riding classes.  So I remembered the second place where I rode.  This place was really messed up, though I didn’t realize it until after I left.  They had a horse camp there over the summer, and I was a junior counselor.  I was about thirteen.  Another girl, a counselor who was sixteen, told me to put away a bag of apples.  I forgot.  The campers had gone home, and the junior counselors were hanging out in the tack shed.  Then I remembered the apples, and rushed to find the bag.  But it was gone.  Thinking I had been helped out by some anonymous do-gooder, I prepared to go back to what I was doing.

But then that sixteen-year-old, my superior, came rushing out of the office, screaming my name, the bag of apples dangling from her hand.  She was furious that someone else had had to do the task she’d set to me.  She started taking apples out of the bag, and one by one, she threw them at me.  I could see that she was holding herself back, so that the throws weren’t too powerful, but apples are hard.  One of them hit my chest.  It still hurt, even if she wasn’t throwing them that hard.  That wasn’t the worst part, though.  Another counselor – twenty years old with clear blue eyes – stood behind her, encouraging her.  When there were no more apples left in the bag, the sixteen-year-old ordered me to clean them up, and then stormed off.  I cried as I dropped the broken, dirty apples into the horses’ feed buckets.

That ranch, it was bad.  Besides the twenty-year-old counselor, there were two grown women who owned and ran the ranch together.  They both wore sunglasses all the time, but if you got in trouble with them – and you did, on a regular basis – they called you over and took those sunglasses off to stare you straight in the eye.  Both these women had icy blue eyes.  Years later, sitting in my stepmom’s armchair, I figured out why I feared blue eyes.

I tell a lot of people about the apple incident.  It’s a funny story, if you take out the pain and humiliation, as I do when I retell it.  I think I need to laugh about it, because if I’m laughing at them, then I’ve won.

My friend asked me why people major in Philosophy.  I told him I didn’t know.  He told me to answer the question anyway.  How could I answer something I didn’t know?  I said, “Because if 2+7=9, then Jupiter is in alignment with Venus, which provides an extracurricular activity for zebras, that directly affects butterflies which land on the eyelashes of certain college students and cause them to major in Philosophy.”  And he replied, “I hate it when 2+7=9.”  And I said, “I know, right?  No wonder I didn’t major in Philosophy.”

(End story)

There you go.  I hope you liked it.  You might have noticed that the majoring in Philosophy thing came directly from this blog (Read the post titled “They Say” if you haven’t already), so now you’re in on the origins of the story.  Doesn’t that make you feel special?  It should.  That’s all for now.

Word of the Day: Reminisce (v) – to recall past experiences, events, etc.

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December 8, 2011 · 2:56 PM

Make with the Wooing Already!

Today’s post is about romance.

There are so many elements to think about when creating a work of fiction that it’s not even funny.  But I want to focus on romance because it does come up a lot, and I think it’s one of the trickiest things to handle.  I’m having trouble putting my thoughts into words for this one, so bear with me.

Romance is an element in a lot of novels. Some people read books specifically to follow characters on their romantic journeys. Heck, there’s an entire genre dedicated to it.

Here’s the problem: Because romance is so prevalent in several genres of literature, it becomes very hard to bring something new to the topic.  In other words, it’s hard to make your characters’ love story unique.  Now, it helps that your story as a whole is unique. (If it isn’t, then see me after class)  With a unique story comes a unique romance.  But you still need to approach it carefully.

What you don’t want in your story is a muscled-up, ruggedly handsome, personality-less man falling in love with a gorgeous, buxom, personality-less woman whose hair always seems to be blowing in the wind.  Then you get this:

The problem with the above scenario is that they are in love for superficial reasons.  This is, of course, an extreme example.  But my point is that the love should never come from you, the author, telling the reader that these two characters are in love.  No, the love should come directly from the characters.  I hope that makes sense.  Remember how I mentioned following your gut?  If your gut is telling you that this relationship you’ve created isn’t working, then it probably isn’t.

You can’t fix the above problem by fabricating reasons for the two characters to be in love, though.  It’s not as simple as going back through the book and inserting some random things that they have in common.  Then, at the end of the book, it’ll kind of seem like your characters are going through a checklist of things that represent their love.  Like this:

What I’m saying is, it’s not enough that they have some stuff in common.  And it’s definitely not enough that he’s saved her life.  Then you have the whole knight-in-shining-armor scenario where the princess falls in love with her savior because she’s pretty much obligated to.

So what does that leave us with?  Well, my advice is that you develop each character’s personality separately.  I think a lot of the time, the problem stems from that whole “Romance is expected” thing I mentioned earlier. You have this well-developed main character who needs a significant other, so you create that extra character for the sole purpose of having your main character fall in love with him/her.  Instead of doing that, remember to develop your love interest’s character beyond the romance.  Give them a back story and a purpose in the plot besides needing rescuing and/or being hot.

I hope that helps.  I might expand on it later, if I feel like it.

Word of the Day: Amorous (adj) – Inclined or disposed to love, especially sexual love.

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December 7, 2011 · 2:33 PM

They Say

First, an update.  My mother pointed out a continuity error in Chapter 1 of Grotesque that has now been fixed.  What’s great is it actually reinforces an earlier point that I’ve made.

In Fantasy, you make up your own rules, and are at liberty to change them.  The error I made was very small – the fireplace in Serrafiel’s room is described as having no wood in it, but then later his master lights a fire in it, and suddenly there’s wood there.  This happened because I originally decided that magical fire would not need anything to burn.  But as I got farther in the book, those rules no longer worked.  For reasons that I don’t care to go into, it became necessary for magical fire to need wood.  So I went back and changed it so that the fireplace in Serrafiel’s room contained wood.  What I did not realize was that I’d mentioned the lack of wood in two places, but I only changed it once.

Moving on…I mentioned that I was going to talk about this in my last post, and I will stay true to my word.

They say, “Write what you know.”  Well, I don’t know who “they” are, but if I ever meet them, I’m going to punch them right in their collective smugness, which I’m now convinced is a punchable organ.  I shall explain why.

Here is a list of things I know:

–          My name

–          Sarcasm

–          How to talk (usually without stopping)

–          Psychology, via courses in high school and college

–          Horses (How to ride them, and some random facts)

–          English, some Japanese, some Spanish

–          Judaism

–          Literary analysis

–          What it is like to be cis-female/Things associated with being cis-female

–          Video games

–          The capital of California

–          How to drive

–          Baseball

–          The lyrics to Fireflies by Owl City

–          Cooking/baking

–          The names of all the kids from Ms. Frizzle’s class in The Magic School Bus. (Dorothy Ann, Phoebe, Wanda, Keesha, Arnold, Carlos, Ralphie, Tim)

–          I love chocolate

–          I hate broccoli

–          Grammar (Usually)

–          How to make lists of things

–          How to type

–          How to navigate an airport

–          Which fork is for the salad

–          How to stop a list

It could go on.  I promise you that I know many other things.  But long as that list is, it is infinitesimal in comparison to the list of things I don’t know.  Here is a brief sample of the things I don’t know:

–          What it’s like to have magical powers

–          What chocolate-covered crickets taste like

–          What it is like to be cis-male

–          The capital of Wyoming

–          Where I’ll be in twenty years (and the future in general)

–          What I ate for breakfast on March 19th, 1994

–          How to shoot a gun (What a relief, right?)

–          French, German, Arabic, Swahili, Welsh, Sanskrit (among others)

–          What kind of tea George Washington preferred to drink

–          The exact number of stars in the sky

–          The lyrics to Last Friday Night by Katy Perry (although I’m pretty sure the phrase “Last Friday night” makes it in there somewhere)

–          What causes laughter (Looking for a more scientific answer than “Jokes.”)

–          Why people major in Philosophy

–          What it’s like to be a chinchilla

–          What it’s like to be in love

–          How to build a windmill

–          How to pilot an aircraft

–          How old Leonardo da Vinci was when he died

–          The names of all the elements in the Periodic Table (Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, and Iron are in there somewhere)

–          All the species of butterfly that exist in the world

–          Your grandmother’s maiden name

You might have noticed that in the first list, I didn’t mention writing as something I know.  That’s because this blog, and specifically this post, is all about how to “know” writing, so I figured I’d leave it out.

You might also recall that there is another common expression that contradicts the “Write what you know” mantra.  Ever heard someone say, “You could fill a book with what that guy doesn’t know”?  That bears some thinking on, doesn’t it?

My point in listing all of these things is that you can’t possibly limit yourself to writing “what you know.”  I think it’s insulting to even suggest that you should.  The whole point of creative writing is that you get to write about stuff you don’t know, oftentimes stuff you could never know – like what it feels like to break a man’s spine with your mind.  To say that you should stick to what you know is saying that you’re not good enough at being creative to write convincingly about something you don’t know.

That said, it is important to remember that what you know can be very useful, like a supplement to your writing that makes it awesome.  Take emotions for an example.  If your main character is a fairy princess who just saw her entire kingdom fall into ruin, chances are, you’re not writing from experience.  But here’s something you might have experienced – sadness.  Or desperation.  Grief.  You can use those things, find those feelings, and insert them into your writing.  Without the emotion, it’s just description, and you can do that easily enough.  You don’t have to have seen a fairy kingdom falling into ruin to be able to call up an image of it in your head, and then write down a description of that image.  It’s the emotion, the feeling, that makes that image meaningful.  That’s what I think of when I hear someone say “write what you know.”

And yes, if you read through my books, you’d see that I have inserted a lot of myself into them. I do that because it’s fun, and because it does help guide my writing if I have little things like that thrown in there that I have some personal connection to.  So that’s what I’ve got to say about that.

Word of the Day: Platitude (n) – a flat, dull, or trite remark, especially one uttered as if fresh or profound.

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