my old enemy, exposition

Some people write their novels start to finish. I am not one of those people. My writing process tends to be a bit more sporadic, jumping around the plot line to those scenes that just get stuck in my brain. Now, this can be a process that works, but it does present it's own unique challenges.

Right now I'm working on a scene that contains maybe the biggest revelation in the book, the main turning point, if you will. I'm excited about this scene because the art of crafting a character's discovery of something is really interesting to me. I have a pretty good grasp of what needs to happen in the scene and how the character will be discovering this important information. The scene sits totally on its own right now, though, and while I know the general context of the situation, it's hard not to cram all that exposition into this one moment. [As a side note, my husband can tell you that I tell stories verbally this way. I try to give all the background contextual information that is connected to the story even though it is generally unnecessary to make the story itself make sense, haha.]

Exposition can be kind of a bear to deal with sometimes. The novels we write will always need some degree of exposition though the amount can change depending on the story and the style. Most of us can't do without exposition but too much of it all at once can suffocate a good story and a reader's interest in it.

Genre fiction can really suffer from this suffocation because there is often so much world building involved and the more fantastical the world, the more exposition is needed in order to really paint a picture for the reader. So we have to find the best way to balance explanation and story to make sure we are showing, rather than telling our readers. This is especially important in the first few chapters of your story where a big portion of exposition will typically be. Much of the time, finding the balance can be as simple as reading your explanations or thinking about what you have to convey to the reader and brainstorming ways that you can show it as an integrated part of a character's actions or thoughts. The more we can see the world through the characters' eyes, the less we'll generally feel like we're reading a guide book and the more attached we'll become to character and story.

For the scene that I'm writing, I'm having to make notes of things that I want to show readers earlier on so that the behavior of the character in this chapter doesn't have to be explained in detail. By spreading out the exposition over the course of several chapters or scenes, I'm unburdening this one. Where it would feel clunky and wordy if I crammed all that explanation into this moment, detracting from the impact and importance of the scene itself, I'm now more free to write the scene as I picture it in my mind. And believe me, doing that honestly makes the writing itself easier to do

speaking for others

Not much on my mind this week for a change. I actually almost completely forgot to write a post today! So I figured, if I don't have much to say, why not help promote some awesome people who are working on exciting stories of their own?

First up is a webcomic written and drawn by a long-time friend of mine. Anarchy Dreamers is a comic that she's been developing for about a decade and it's all coming to fruition. I've seen a lot of the story and art development over the years and I have to say that I'm super stoked for this story and I think you all should be too!

Her website describes the premise of the comic this way:
"A group of friends wake up from a terrible nightmare, gifted with strange abilities and memories of a different world.
Dreamwalkers, gifted with the ability to see the physical manifestations of other people's dreams, are divinely tasked with protecting society from their own demons. Without intervention, these dreams may wreck havoc and alter reality (and the general population) for good. Tabbi's not sure what to believe, because she swears she has no memory of dreamworlds and dreamwalkers before the day she found out she was one. Neither do any of her recently-awakened dreamwalker friends. They all have the same memories of a different world that seems more like home than this one. Are they transplants from another world? Or was that reality just another dream?"

There's a link on the site for the prequel which I highly recommend reading, though it's not required in order to get the story line of the main comic. She's posted the first issue of Anarchy Dreamers so far and the very start of the second. The characters are relatable and hilarious, the comic well drawn and approachable so go check it out!

Next is a story just beginning. The Story of Midas is a twist on the well known legend/myth of King Midas and his golden touch. The author has only started posting but guys, I am really interested to see where this goes.

Her prologue reads:
"And so a boy was born under a curse of blood, his flesh would turn others into gold. This boy was named Midas and his life would move from village to village, tale to tale. Until the world shunned him into an honorable-less legend, a tale of a king and the curse of his greed. How well Time has hid his true story."

I am an avid lover of retellings, especially of myths and fairy tales and this idea just sounds so fresh and intriguing - definitely an approach I haven't seen before with this story. Sharing your work online is always a scary thing to do and I salute those writers who publish their stories this way. They need all the support and positive feedback we can give them so save her tumblr in your blog feeds or favorites and make sure to check this story out. I know I'll be eagerly awaiting each new post!

brain vomit, here we go

Editing, grammar issues, and a movie review. It's a full day. I'm going to be jumping around a lot so I'm apologizing in advance.

Guys, commas and I have a love hate relationship. Either I have too many, or not enough. Grammatical punctuation: a girl's necessary, yet unlikable friend.

I've asked a few friends to help me edit a short story that I originally wrote for my writing class over the summer. It's been at least eight months since I was last in a real writing critique situation and I've had to remind myself to put my tough writer skin back on.

I have issues with symmetry and aesthetics. I like to have things looking neat and orderly so breaking up text with bracketed notes really goes against the grain. I'm really excited, though. As much as I don't love grammar and the process of critique can be kind of painful, I'm eager to fix those little mistakes and find the best ways to really polish out the rough spots and turn this story from something that I just enjoy to something that really shines on its own.

It's so tempting to pull this piece out after several months and just say "oh, it's fine" but that's not how we improve and polish our work, is it? No, it's not.

Yay writing!

On the topic of grammar, I've been inadvertently and obsessively thinking about the difference between "good" and "well." I'm pretty sure that this is what brought on my little mental debate:

So yes, when someone asks how you're doing, "I'm doing well" is the grammatically correct response. But people use this correct grammar so infrequently that it kind of sounds weird to say it now. On the other hand, the more I've been thinking about this, the more saying "I'm doing good" is bothering me. There are phrases and words in the English language that we've kind of bent to our will, or laziness, over the years. Part of that is a natural effect of a growing, living language, but where is the line? I mean, I get the changes in spelling of certain words and sometimes even a slight change in definition but with "well" and "good" are we really just being lazy? The two words, in the context of "how are you?" mean two totally separate things and it's been getting under my skin recently.

But how much does it really matter? It's like fewer vs. less. Each has their grammatical place but most people don't know the difference or when one is appropriate and the other is not. Do we hang on to grammatical rules like this or are these things in the list of words and phrases that get bent over the course of history?

This is why I'm not in charge of decisions involving this sort of thing.

SPOILER ALERT - Cease and desist your reading if you have not yet seen The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It's for your own good.

Okay, so Tim and I went and saw this movie last Friday and we both loved it. That fact alone is really worth mentioning considering my recent depressing track record of being a grumpy-gus about movies we've gone to see. I think, in part Walter Mitty was just a refreshing break from book-movies that fell flat for me [there is an original short story but there are few enough connections between the two that I wouldn't even say the main character is the same person]. The biggest reason I loved this movie, though, was the characterization of Walter. I can point to a few films or tv shows that have notable characterization [Firefly, Chronicle, etc.] and Walter Mitty has definitely been added to that list.

The thing about him is how real he feels. Story lines like this tend to focus on the main character overcoming a traumatic past, getting a personality as well as a backbone. The result is often the stereotypical middle-aged, directionless, socially awkward, bland type of character. They are stuck because of something that happened to them years ago and they've never done anything important with their life. They don't have any interesting attributes or skills and the plot sets out to reinvent them. The beautiful thing about Walter is that he doesn't need to be reinvented. At the start of the movie he is an interesting character, he just doesn't have much confidence. He is still a good skateboarder, where other writers might have written that scene in the park with Walter trying to show Cheryl's son some tricks and then falling flat on his face. He has an awesome job, even if it is being undervalued. The thing is that he isn't being exclusively picked on in this department, the whole company is basically being let go which keeps it from feeling like bad things only happen to this guy.

While Walter does have a sad past, with the death of his father, the movie doesn't dwell on that. All we get there is his mother's remark that working at Papa John's must have been hard for him, his reaction to Papa John's after his mother brings this up, and telling Cheryl about his father's death. In treating his past this way we actually learn about Walter as a person more than if the movie had turned it into a sob-story about healing the pain of a lost parent. Walter, even as a teenager, didn't think about the connection with "papa" because he was the kind of kid to take the responsibility of providing and just moving forward. Even his conversation with Cheryl highlights the fact that he isn't consumed by his father's death. And I love that conversation for the beautiful portrayal of memory. For Walter, he can't stand Papa John's because of the cups. It's not even something that he can explain beyond that. It's just the cups. And when he's telling her that his father died when he was young he mentions that it was a Tuesday. The fact that they included little things like the cups and Tuesday here make this scene so much more real because our memories work like that. Little, inconsequential details stand out to us and these things really help ground the character.

Walter doesn't become a totally different person, the way he daydreams himself to be, he just becomes more of himself. Everything, his skills, knowledge, friendliness, and courage are in him the entire time. Some people might say that's kind of cliche but I disagree. I think it's beautiful because this is the human condition. We all have different traits and skills and I think we're really meant to become ourselves, to magnify those attributes that we've always had. I think one of the things Walter learns in this movie is that you don't have to be Sean O'Connell, someone who goes flying off around the world all the time, in order to see, or be an extraordinary person. People that we think of in those terms exist in our everyday lives - the Walters, Cheryls, and Tods. You are someone that can be described that way.

Walter does some pretty crazy stuff in this movie and you know what, it all felt believable to me because Walter feels believable. Never underestimate the importance of characterization and making your characters feel real. Brilliant, beautifully constructed characters can make any fantasy story feel real and they will always set a great story above the rest. These are the stories we remember, the films that leave us breathless and mind-blown for years. These are the kind of characters you want in your books.

this is seriously the last straw

I really am going to have to give up going to see movies made from books I've read. I know I've said this before, but guys, it's getting worse.

The Giver has apparently been made into a movie and is coming out this year. The actor for Jonas is twenty-four. I just...I just can't even... "Aging up" is a term I'm seeing in relation to a lot of recent book-to-movie adaptations, used as an excuse for why the actors cast are so much older than the characters they are supposed to portray. They did this with Ender's Game but I feel like the age gap involved there was much less obvious and jarring. There is no way people are going to believe that this guy is twelve. Just...really. I'm so blown away by this decision that I honestly have no desire to see the movie now which is a shame because I think Jeff Bridges will make an excellent Giver and Meryl Streep will be a fantastic Chief Elder. [Oh, by the way, Taylor Swift has been cast as Rosemary]

I had made it a personal goal to get better about my attitude towards movies made from books and I really thought I could get better in my reception of them, but this casting issue is kind of pushing me over the edge right now. I'm hoping that I will still find some films based on books in the future that I can appreciate more but this is certainly not going to be one of them. I hope other people enjoy it, I really do, but I guess I'm too set in my purist ways to make way for this kind of discrepancy.

In other news, a woman at my work has the most adorable hanging glass terrarium in her office which really struck me as the best way to have a plant in an office. It's also given me the craving to make my own set of hanging terrariums to arrange in a corner of our apartment. Much less messy than potted plants, out of the way - in a beautiful way - and generally hardy so I have a much smaller chance of killing whatever's inside. I miss the green of the east coast so bad my chest aches sometimes so this could also be a fun way to bring that green into my living space.

resolving to make resolutions

Standing at the start of a new year feels like standing at the top of a downhill slope but it's an illusion because I know it's actually a mountain I'm about to climb.

I've seen a lot of people making posts reflecting on what went on in their lives over the last year which is a pretty fool-proof way to feel bad about all the things I didn't do. This in turn can make you feel pressured to wow the world in the new year. While I have enough experience with negative self-talk to remember to compare myself against myself, rather than others, I do still feel that drive to make some resolutions.

Here's the problem: I suck at making and keeping goals. Unless they're regulated by someone else like grades in school, follow-through doesn't come naturally to me which is probably why I've never really made new years resolutions before. But there's a first time for everything and, as the proverb says: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

So, how to up my chances of following-through with these goals? One of the pluses of having a smart phone now is that I can write up my goals on my phone to have with me as a reminder wherever I go. I am 100% positive that I won't keep any of them perfectly but I'm hoping for consistency of effort rather than perfection. If your definition of success depends on never failing, you'll generally end up feeling more like a failure than you might otherwise. Failing is part of life, it's what we do when we're learning and growing but failing at something doesn't mean you'll never be good at it.

I've never watched this show but I can't help but appreciate the point he's trying to get across here, ha ha.
Another idea was to come up with tangible goals, specific things that I wanted to address and knew how to change - rather than just saying something vague like "get in shape." This means that some of the items on my list seem kind of silly or weird since I have the same concept a lot of people do - that new years resolutions have to be something grand - but it's also empowering to looks at the list and feel like all those things I wrote down are attainable if I just use my time productively and stop being lazy about certain habits I've developed.

Are you setting any goals for yourself this year? What do you do to keep yourself on track when you set goals?