Quick Slants – 15 Apr 2010 Edition

Quick slants for today:

• I need a haircut.  Desperately.  Thankfully I’ll be getting one tomorrow.  Which is about a week and a half later than I usually get one on my typical schedule.
• Chapter 9 of “Echoes” is about 90% done.  Of the nine previous parts (“Echoes” has a prologue), this is the longest chapter by far.  At last count, Ch9 is a whopping twenty one pages long.  
• The danger with anything too long – whether we’re talking about movies, TV shows, books, chapters of books, songs, and even non-fiction – is that there is always a risk that whoever is reading or watching or listening will lose interest due to the sheer demand on their attention span.  Once your audience’s attention drops, it’s very difficult to recapture it.  

As a writer, you have to be conscious of this danger.  Failing to acknowledge this inevitably results in you losing your audience.  Obviously, this is the most undesirable condition.

How does one generate, sustain, and keep the audience’s attention?  An old college professor of mine who taught creative writing once told us, his class, that conflict and drama are the secret to good fiction.  If you are skillful at weaving tension into your plot and are good at describing your characters’ reactions to those tensions, you’re on your way to writing good, interesting fiction.

Quick Slants – 14 Apr 2010 Edition

Quick slants for today:

• Amongst the few physical maladies I’m fighting presently, the pinched nerve in my neck, which affects my left entire left arm, is easily the most annoying.
• Not only are the manifestations (attacks of numbness, tingling, noticeable loss of strength, and (now thankfully rare) muscle spasms in my left bicep) of the pinched nerve annoying, but the inevitable consequences of having the problem are even more so.  Physical discomforts I can live with; harder to swallow is the impaired function of my left arm.
• As I’d said, my left arm is noticeably weaker than it used to be, but the bigger problem is the loss of fine motor control.  I can quite easily regain the lost power.  
• The loss of fine motor control is somewhat distressing because I use my hands to do so many things.  From playing guitar to writing to using a screwdriver and other tools, my hands are so important to me.  
• Sometimes I think that what a person can do with his/her hands largely defines who/what they are.
• I’m more afraid of losing the ability to use my hands than I am of losing my legs.  God forbid that either disaster strikes, but if I had a choice, I’d rather not lose my hands, please.

Thankfullly, the pinched nerve problem seems to be abating.  The first week was the worst; this is now the third week that I’ve lived with this issue, and the tingles seem to be decreasing in both frequency and in severity.  I’m thankful for that.

Before anyone asks, yes, I’ve tried to arrange a doctor’s visit for this problem.  The people who know me best know that if a health problem or bodily ache or pain is something I can endure, I don’t even take medicines for it; if the problem gets to be unbearable, or if it severely affects my life, then I go ahead and see a medical professional.  This pinched nerve qualifies as one of those severe problems.  Unfortunately my primary care physician is booked solid until well into the first week of May.  Quite inconvenient for me, for sure.

I hope the trend of improvement continues.

Quick Slants – 13 Apr 2010 Edition

Today’s quick slants:

• Something I always try to keep in mind whenever I’m writing fiction (this includes stories, song lyrics, and poetry):  Write what you know.
• An unfortunate consequence of this is coming up with something plausible, much less “truthful,” when writing from a woman’s perspective.  
• Being a man, despite whatever sensitivity I am able to muster, I’ve never been in a woman’s shoes, so it’s a little challenging to get into a woman’s head.  This is especially true when it comes to storywriting when the story’s central character is a woman.
• I don’t underestimate the importance of trying to understand the perspective of a female character.  Nor would any writer attempting to endow his/her work with a strong sense of verisimilitude, particularly when it comes to the credible portrayal of characters.

These aforementioned issues are part of my writer’s struggles in “Echoes,” my ongoing fanfiction project.  As alluded to above, the central character in “Echoes” is a woman.  Not only that, but she is a woman whose heroic journey figuratively takes her to Hell and back, as Dante does in Dante Alighieri‘s La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy).  While it’s fairly easy to come up with plot points and descriptions of scenarios and environments, it is far more challenging to portray a character’s reactions, especially if the character is female.  Foremost in my mind in writing these parts of the narrative is the question:  Is this what a woman would really feel, or is this just what I think she would?

I must remember to emphasize this very point with my crew of trusted reviewers and beta readers, many of whom are, indeed, women.

Quick Slants – 8 Apr 2010 Edition

Quick slants for today:

• I don’t know why I’m such a painfully-slow writer.  
• Actually, I DO know why:  I’m constantly in “editing” mode even as I write.  I write something, more often than not I change it right away.  (To wit, I’ve rewritten the preceding sentence three times since I first started writing it.  No joke, either.)  You do that to nearly every line you write, you naturally take more time doing it.
• The “classical” way to write is to just pour all your thoughts/feelings/ideas out onto the paper (or the storage drive, as the case may be), then edit later.  That approach works great for the great majority of writers, but not for me, for some reason.  Why the classical method doesn’t work so well for me is a little more challenging to discern.
• I have no compunction, no regrets at all, at nuking entire chapters and starting over if the whole piece warrants a fresh approach to the portion of it that I’m presently working on.  On many stories that I’ve written, in fact, I’ve deleted dozens of pages worth of narrative if a new plot development, or a new twist on the theme or whatever else, begs exploration.  Thankfully, I always wind up far more contented with the new material.
• I’ve got a ton of unfinished, “still-in-development” writing projects in my pile of written works.  I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my lifetime, no matter how long it eventually winds up to be, will not be sufficient to see all such works to completion.  I add more to the pile than I actually finish…

Having said all this, there is one portion of one of my works that I’m almost desperate to finish.  Chapter 9 of my fanfiction novella, “Echoes” (based on “V:  The Final Battle”), is building up to its narrative climax.  It’s a very difficult part of the story to write, primarily becasue of the story’s heroine’s experiences during this chapter, so I’m getting quite anxious to get to the finish line and start writing the beginning of the denouement.

I’ve given myself two weeks more to finish the ninth chapter.  

I hope I can hold myself to that self-imposed deadline.

Quick Slants – 2 Apr 2010 Edition

Today’s quick slants:

• I recently restarted playing Madden NFL 10 on the PS3 at my parents’ house.  It had been many months since the last time I played.  I had forgotten just how fun it is to play video game pro football, and how it is to think as a football coach.
• That reminds me:  I also need to advance my “Dynasty” on NCAA Football 2010 (I play Stanford) when I return to the PS3.
• At my apartment, gaming lately consists of FPSes, with Battlefield:  Bad Company 2 being the current favorite.  Hitherto I’d been playing quite a bit of Call of Duty:  Modern Warfare 2.  Same genre of video game, but very different from each other in terms of gameplay and design priorities.  (I’m speaking purely of the single-player campaign, by the way.  I’ve not gone to war online with either game yet, as I think the experience more or less requires you be part of a dedicated team of players.  I don’t have such a team with me, nor do I belong to one, so…)
• I think CoD:MW2 has a better story (though BF:BC2’s tale is compelling in its own way), but BC2 has the edge when it comes to how using/manipulating the various weapons are concerned.  The simulation of recoil in BC2’s various weaponry is particularly impressive.
• Speaking of FPSes, here is a list of the ones I’ve played to some appreciable degree:  Far Cry (still one of my favorites); Half Life 2 (someday I want to finish this game; I’ve only really scratched the surface of this classic); Team Fortress 2 (I’m usually everyone’s favorite target, yikes!); Battlefield 2 (like Far Cry, an oldy-but-goody title, albeit not one endowed with a real narrative); Battlefield 2142 (virtually identical to BF2 in terms of not really having a story, but more focused on action on the battlefield); Doom 3; and those venerable classics, the original Doom and Wolfenstein 3-D.

For all my declarations that the racing sim is my favorite video game genre, it appears that FPSes aren’t too far down the depth chart.  Until I had put that list together (I feel that I’ve actually left out a title or two from that list, and I didn’t even add the list of FPSes that I own but haven’t played yet), I didn’t actually realize how many examples of the genre I’ve actually sampled!

No matter what else, though, if a game is fun, and if you get more out of it than thrills and excitement (not from simulated killing, explosions, and destruction, mind you, but in avoiding all that), then it’s worth the investment of your free time.  Believe it or not, thanks to FPSes, I’ve learned quite a bit about combat with firearms, and the things I’ve learned I’ve sometimes incorporated into the fiction I write.

And they said video games are a complete waste of time.