Joe Vasicek

Rgggh!!! No time!!!!

Nope, no progress on the story today. !!!!حرام!!! حرام Shame!!! Shame!!!! And there are like four or five things I’d like to blog on as well. WHY do I never do the important things until 1:00 am?! Shame!!!!

Well, the news that I DO have is that I’ve decided to start organizing my life better. I made a list today of all the things that I have to do, and sorted it according to priority. I learned this pretty good system from my father, where you prioritize everything according to first priority, second, and third, and then within each of those groups, you prioritize according to A, B, and C. I made one list for all the periodic things I need to do, and another for the things that will be finished once I complete them. I plan to pick and choose maybe five or six things each day and write them on a 3×5 notecard that I’ll carry with me. Since I’m learning a language, I have PLENTY of cards.

Hopefully, I can use this to better discipline myself. As an experiment, I tried to do my homework first thing for a couple of days, and it was very surprising how liberating it was. I need to do that more often.

Something is happening to me that I NEVER thought would happen–I’m getting sick and tired of school. I figure this is God’s way of pushing me to graduate, because up until now I’ve loved college so much that I haven’t wanted to leave. God, being all knowing, knows that I’ll never leave this awesome university until I’m pushed to do so. Unfortunately, this only leads to more complications on my end of things. But I’m not complaining–God knows what he’s doing, and he’s doing it for my own good. I only wish I weren’t so stubborn–maybe then, God wouldn’t have to push me so much.

Mahlish. Tomorrow is a new day.

Why are writers so self conscious?

This is something I’ve noticed: that aspiring writers are generally introverted and very self conscious–to the point even of being fragile. It’s hard for them to feel confident and very easy for them to feel depressed because they think that their writing is all bad.

I’ve been in the same boat–and now that my latest attempt at a novel is starting to really become something, I’m starting to feel the same way again. In fact, I spent an entire year during high school vaguely depressed because I became frustrated and discouraged with my writing (there were other factors, of course, but my own feeling of failure about my writing was what really triggered it).

I was chatting with Aneeka via gmail the other day, and I asked her “why are writers so self conscious?” The conversation went like this:

Me: why is it that writers are almost always so self conscious?
Aneeka: because writing is a talent that is so subjective.
Me: what does subjective talent have to do with it?
Aneeka: subjective talent means if you think you do well and a few other people do too, you can be devastated when someone else says it’s awful and you realize that that’s completely right for them.

I think Aneeka was saying that it’s so easy to be self conscious because people can both lift you up with the highest praise and tear you down into the dirt with criticism, and both views can be right at the same time. The idea is that since writing is so subjective, different readers can say different, even contradictory things about your writing, and be right about it. Because of this, it’s very hard to hit a point where everyone can say “this is good writing,” and so long as someone can rightfully say that it’s bad, it hurts.

However, to my mind, this doesn’t exactly answer the question. It points out how the self-consciousness comes about, but it doesn’t address the root cause itself–the question “why.” At least, it doesn’t seem to to me.

In my opinion, there are at least a couple of reasons why writers are so self-conscious. The first reason has to do with the amount of effort and emotional commitment that goes into the act of writing and telling a story. It takes a tremendous amount of work to write a piece of good fiction–not just physical or mental work, but emotional work as well. It’s only natural that a significant piece of your identity becomes invested in such a tremendous undertaking. Because you spend so much effort on the story, you feel that you yourself will succeed or fail according to how the story succeeds or fails. And, as Aneeka said, because stories are so subjective, it’s very easy for someone to write off your story as crap. Thus, consciousness about your story’s quality is transformed into self-consciousness.

The second idea is related, but slightly different. It has to do with the way that we, as a society, build boundaries around our lives.

The degree to which our lives are ruled by social norms is incredible. Most of these norms we don’t even notice even as we obey them. When we communicate with each other, we do so through a set of filters–not just on the receiving end, but on the transmitting end as well. When I’m talking with a girl that I think is cute, I will express my thoughts in a completely different way than I’ll express them when I’m around my roommates. Indeed, there are many thoughts that I’ll completely filter out, depending on the situation. It’s not just because society expects me to do it. It’s because I myself want to run things through this filter–that I feel a need to put on a mask. It might be a small mask, or a mostly transparent mask, but the mask is still there.

However, in order to be a good writer, you have to break down these personally-enforced filters and take off these masks to express your most personal and embarrassing thoughts and ideas. This comes from the idea that you can’t really write anything that you haven’t experienced (which, I’m learning from my Phil 202 class, was argued by Hume). The characters that you write are going to have different bits and pieces of you in them–otherwise, you just wouldn’t understand them. It’s possible for you to imagine the setting or the storyline or any other part of the story, because you can piece it together from things that you’ve actually experienced. The emotions that your story draws upon and (hopefully) invokes are emotions that you yourself have experienced.

In order to make sure that the characters are real, the setting and plot are believable, and that there is real emotional depth to the story, you have to take your mask off. You have to expose your real self to the paper, without filtering it for the girl that you’re trying to impress, or the roommates that you’re trying to get to accept you, or any of the other people that you interact with. As soon as you start filtering, you hold yourself back from really using that part of you, or of your experience, to generate that really interesting character, or that really amazing world, or that really powerful emotional depth. Your story will suffer.

According to this take on the question, learning to write well is learning to stop filtering yourself and completely expose yourself, in a hundred different ways, to an audience of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. No wonder, then, that it’s so easy to be self-conscious! The more you work on your story, the more you take down your filters in order for your story to be good, and the more exposed and vulnerable you make yourself.

I could keep on running with this thought, and wonder how this relates to what seems to be a correlation between self-consciousness and introvertedness among writers–whether one causes the other, vice versa, or a third variable is causing both–but I figure that this post is long enough as it is, without my rambling on. Maybe that’s a subject for later.

1800 words and breaking the 100 page mark

My story is double spaced, in 12 point Courier New, but yeah, it’s pretty awesome to break 100 pages. What’s surprising to me is that that translates to 77 pages in single spaced 12 point Times New Roman. I thought that my story was advancing really fast, but now, I’m not quite so sure. A lot has happened so far, but I’m just getting to the point where Ian really begins to interact with the people of the strange planet–the part where his presence starts to upset the established order and turn society upside down. Well, if it’s not progressing exactly as fast as I thought it was, at least it’s not progressing too slow. This is probably a pretty healthy pace.

I was going to do a lot of other stuff tonight, but then I thought about how if you really want to be a writer, or into writing, the only real rule that you MUST keep is that you must write. So that’s what I decided to do. And it’s only barely midnight. Maybe I’ll actually finish some of my homework. Or maybe I’m too tired…

This really is the point where things start to get more difficult. The act of writing was a lot more difficult for me now than it was a while ago. I don’t know exactly why. The words didn’t seem to flow out exactly the way I wanted them to, so I had to change my sentences a lot as I was writing them. I’ll probably end up completely changing them again in the rewrite, but it was hard just to put the stuff out. Writing is a lot of work.

I am really happy, though, that things are progressing well. I’m just about where I want to be, in terms of the stopping point that I want to arrive at before November (and <gasp> nanowrimo comes upon us!!!). I’m going to have to put this story on hold for nanowrimo. I hope that nanowrimo doesn’t kill me–or my grades.

But another good thing is that I’m getting good ideas for what happens in the next few pages as I’m writing. For example, about a month ago, I had a vague idea of a couple of characters that might be interesting, a possible rivalry between a naive Ian and a jealous prince, and some vague ideas about how the ancestors of the people of this planet pray towards the spaceships that brought them to the planet’s surface, much like how the Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca. As I was writing, those ideas began to take a much more definite form, and I know exactly how I want the main plot to progress (I didn’t necessarily know that a month ago). Now, as I’m preparing to introduce a couple of the new characters that I’d thought of a month or two ago, they seem to be taking life in my head, as if I know who they are and know exactly how to start telling their stories. I just want to get to the point now where they start to come in, so I can have them interact with the other characters and make the story more interesting than it already is.

Another good thing happened just yesterday. I was at the quark opening social (which was AWESOME!!! Almost a hundred geeks like me gathered into a tight, confined space, watching sci fi and anime, playing computer games, and talking about Final Fantasy and other rpgs), and one of the new members (Danke) of the writing group asked me about my story. She was asking specifically about the plot, so there really was no way I could get around telling her all about it (I tried–“it’s about a clash of cultures”–but that wasn’t enough). To my surprise, after about ten or fifteen minutes of me monologuing about the plot of the story, she was still interested. This leads me to two conclusions: 1) girls who like sci fi are AWESOME and 2) the story in my head has got some good potential.

Well, it’s only 12:30, but I just laid down for a couple of minutes, and it felt so good that I think I’m going to bed right now.

Things are becoming busy, but I’m still writing

Yesterday was an extremely busy day! Much more than I was expecting. I probably would have accomplished more with a better plan and more self-discipline, but it was a good day. However, there were a few things I didn’t do–like write.

I think things are still going well, though. The day before, I wrote 1,300 words. I want to get to a certain part of the story before nanowrimo in November, because we’re probably going to do something for that contest as a writing group. Several people have voiced interest, and I would also like to participate.

For those of you who don’t know, “nanowrimo” stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s basically an informal worldwide (despite the name) contest, where the goal is to start and finish a novel of 50,000 words within the month of November. The idea is to focus less on editing and rewriting, and more on actually finishing something.

I would personally like to do this, since I’m so bad about finishing any of my stories. Also, there has been some interest in the club, and I think this could really be an awesome writing group activity as well. It takes place during an extremely hectic time, but I think we can do it–if we really want to.

Of course, it wouldn’t make sense for the writing group to do it if the leader of the writing group wasn’t doing it as well, so come this November, I’ll probably end up putting aside The Lost Colony for a while and focusing on the nanowrimo project.

I think that my story needs a lot more work than just writing the stuff down. There are some things that I’m going to need to think through a little more carefully. I watched a movie today in my Middle Eastern Geography class, about pastoral nomads in the Zagros mountains. It made me ask some questions about the nomads in my own story. I’m patterning the culture of the people of the lost planet loosely off of Middle Eastern cultures, and I’m getting to the point where questions about this culture are becoming more and more important.

As I watched the movie, I started thinking about the nomads that Ian runs into in the second chapter. Where do they live? What do they do for a living? Why are they nomads? What do they produce? Do they have any flocks or herds? If not, what else do they do? Why do they travel with their women and children on their raiding forays? How do they migrate? What are their relations with the villages and kingdoms in the more pastoral lands? World building questions like this.

Fortunately, this is where half the fun is. If I didn’t invent worlds like this in my mind for fun when I don’t have anything else that I have to think about, I probably wouldn’t want to be a writer. It does take a lot of thought, though, and that takes time and effort. Probably I’ll be spending most of my time between classes thinking these things through–you know, when you’re walking from one part of campus to another, and don’t have to think about anything.

But still…one month…and I’ve got a lot of ground to cover! This is where I either start getting serious or where things putter out. But this time, I’m going to be serious!

A friendly review and some revision

This isn’t going to be very long, because it’s late at night. Aneeka was kind enough to read my story, and gave some good pointers. I was pleasantly surprised that she felt that she could understand and sympathize with the characters. I was especially surprised that she sympathized with the main character, Ian, because he’s the one who eludes me the most. He’s basically a quiet yes-man who keeps to himself, an average guy who prefers anonymity. Definitely the opposite of my personality! But I might have struck the right note with that.

She also pointed out a couple of flaws in the way I chose to develop two of the characters. First, when I introduced Melinda before the crash, I introduced her as a very strong woman who had risen quickly in the military ranks. After the crash, she broke down and displayed a lot of stereotypical feminine weakness. I had done that in order to put Ian in a position where I could show something of his character, but later decided that he wasn’t like that after all, so I was more than happy to rewrite this scene.

She also pointed out how Leila, in the first scene in which she appears, does some things that are just stupid, which makes it harder for the reader to connect with her. She’s a very independent young woman, but I had her stand up to her captors in a way that was just asking for abuse. I wanted to introduce her as a prisoner receiving abuse at the hands of her captors, in order to generate sympathy for her right at the outset. Having her do something stupid takes away from that, so I decided to have her think out her defiant thoughts without saying them out loud. It did seem to work better.

So, instead of adding on any words to the story, I quickly ran through it from the beginning to end and made the revisions that made the most sense after chatting with Aneeka. It took me about an hour, so you couldn’t exactly call it a major rewrite, though you could say that it helped to put me on a better track.

I’m not going to do much revising at this point–I’ve just got to get the darned thing down on paper. You can’t rewrite what you haven’t yet written. Just got to move forward.

1079 words and a goal adjustment

1,079 words today, but I decided to throw out the last 487, so it balances out to about 500. The really cool thing was that I wrote all this in the two separate hours I had between classes. I’ve always thought that I should only write if I have a large amount of time set aside in which I could just focus on it. This shows me that I can jump right into it and do fairly well!

I need to adjust my goals…basically, this weekly goal thing just doesn’t work for me. I need a daily goal. 500 words sounds as good as any. I’ll try it again.

But there are so many other things I should be doing that I never do…the story of my life…at least I’m only taking 15 credits this semester.

Aneeka is reviewing my story right now. It will be interesting to hear what she has to say about it. I know she can be pretty thorough, but all I wanted was an initial reaction, so I told her just to read it casually and tell me what she thinks. She told me that sometimes, if she’s reading a book that has bad characterization or other elements, she’ll chuck the book across the room. I told her not to throw her computer across the room!

Hopefully it won’t be that bad. However, I still haven’t really figured out the main character’s character. That’s probably for the best, though, because I won’t be falling back to stereotypes (like I am with some of the other characters). It’s very easy to write a character when you have an archetype in mind. It’s a lot harder when the character’s personality and life experiences just don’t match your own. I’ve got some figuring out to do, but I won’t let that stop me from progressing forward.

Something happened the other day that worried me about how the story is progressing. I was hanging out with my sister, and her boyfriend asked me to tell him about the story I’m writing. A few months ago, I’d be dying to tell people about the story, and I’d go into great detail of the history of the story’s universe, how everything is set up, what ideas I’ve got for it, etc. Usually, it would bore people to death, so I’ve gotten used to just not telling them about it. This time, when he was actually asking me to tell him all about it, I told him but it just didn’t seem as exciting or compelling as it did before. Am I losing my belief in this story? Or is it just that I’ve got so many other things on my mind that this is getting pushed down the ladder?

Either way, I think the solution is to write more often, and just be immersed in the world that this is taking place. You see, when I write, my writing surprises me. I’ll find myself describing things about the world that I hadn’t thought up at all, but it will make perfect sense and fit in fairly well. It’s pretty cool

So, the new goal is: write every day, at least 500 words.

Awesome Quark writing meeting!

We had another writing meeting this Saturday, and it went really well! We had quite a few new people! I was pleasantly surprised! I knew we would have a few newcomers, since we got a few submissions from some new people, but I didn’t realize that people would come and bring friends! It was great. Hopefully, many of them will stay with us!

Two of the new people are really into illustration as well as writing. One guy (I think his name was Travis but I’m really horrible with names) told us that he uses autocad to draw out spaceships and dragons for his stories. Pretty cool! It reminds me that the Quark writing vp is also supposed to be involved with the art section, which has pretty much been dead or dormant for the past year or two. I’m not that much into illustrating, so I’ll have to talk with the rest of the Quark leadership to figure out what to do about that. Hopefully, with the right person over it, we could do really well! We’ll see.

We had more submissions than we could handle this time, so I had to put off Evan’s and Ben’s stuff for the next meeting, as well as my own chapter from my story. I wasn’t expecting that, so I wasn’t sure how to handle it. If I put off someone else’s stuff so that I could get some feedback, I was worried that would seem a little self serving, so I decided to just wait for the second chapter to get critiqued. However, I think from now on it’s going to be whatever chapter I’m working on plus the first five stories to come in.

Jakeson and Gamila both submitted stuff that they’ve been working on for a while, and I think they got some good feedback. They’re both agreeable to the new rule that you can only submit the same thing twice. I hope it helps them to move forward on their projects rather than endlessly rehashing the same chapters. That’s the goal of the new rule.

A couple of the new people who submitted didn’t show up. They later told me that they got mixed up about the time, and apologized for missing the meeting. It was fine, we finished a little early, so all was good. One of the stories seemed a little bit risque to me–not so explicit that we couldn’t look at it, but it had a few sexual references that seemed a little awkward. He ended up missing the meeting, but I read his piece. It had some really interesting ideas to it, such as a giant hunter who ends up getting captured by a female giant who doesn’t want to kill him. The sexual tension was hilarious and I liked it. It was just a few references he gave to some scenes in the local tavern that I didn’t like very much. Not just for the sexual innuendos, but because they didn’t seem to help the story at all, BYU standards or not. Of course, that’s all the more reason to discuss it. Maybe we’ll be able to look at it at the next meeting.

What with Joel and this new guy, it looks like we might have a little bit of controversy down the road. And, actually, I’m kind of looking forward to it. I like controversy–otherwise, I wouldn’t be a Poli Sci major. I just hope we can handle it in a way that everyone takes something positive and useful from it. It would be a shame if people ended up getting turned off to the club over it. But I think we’re perfectly capable of expressing ourselves and having an enlightening discussion on the edgier topics.

We decided to start a short story contest for the club: the word limit is 1,000, and the requirement is that the phrase “because I’m awesome” has to appear somewhere in the story. The reading club will be doing the judging (hopefully that’ll help to connect us a little more with the rest of Quark), and the deadline is October 6th. We got the idea from something Jakeson said at the Sept 11th meeting: we were talking about this one scene in John’s story (he’s one of the new guys) where this huntsman bursts in through the window and kills a couple of the bad guys, and Jakeson said that the huntsman should say something like “because I’m awesome,” or something like that. I forget, but it was pretty funny. So, I figured it would be good to do that for our first flash fiction contest. Something light and funny.

Everyone seems to say that Saturdays work better than Tuesdays, so it looks like we’re going to have more of those meetings. However, the day after I scheduled a meeting for October 6th, I realized that that’s the weekend of General conference! So, now the next meeting is rescheduled for Tuesday the 2nd.

1,200 words and another story idea

1,200 words today. After going to a BYU Freedom Society meeting (it’s a new political club), I went to the LRC and just wrote. It’s been so long since my last writing session that I had to read over what I’d written last time, and in doing so I found out that I wanted to rewrite a lot of it. However, I (mostly) resisted the temptation, since I really have to just move forward and leave the rewrite for later. The hardest thing isn’t going to be editing the story; it’s going to be getting it all down, from beginning to end. That’s what I’ve got to focus on.

It was good to write. It’s been too long. However, I’ll bet I could have more time if I just was more efficient with it. Procrastinating homework by playing Street Fighter on my desktop is probably something I could do without. Maybe if I could get into the habit of doing my homework asap every day…

Tonight was the submission deadline for Saturday’s Quark meeting, and I was really surprised that we got so many submissions! About five or six new people are probably going to show up at this next meeting! Apparently, placing the fliers in the dorms was a good idea! I’ve been getting emails that go like this: “hi, I saw the Quark flier in the dorms, I’ve been looking for a writing group since I started coming to BYU and I love writing sci fi / fantasy, so when I heard about your group I got really excited!” In fact, I’ll probably have to not send out the next chapter of my story to this next meeting, just because there are so many submissions! Not including mine we’ve got six, and I’m debating whether or not to send Jakeson’s out, since he said he’d be ok with not sending it out if we’ve got so many other submissions. But I don’t think I should send mine out if I don’t send his out…I don’t know. I would like to get some feedback, but we’ll just have to see how this goes…

Oh, and my cousin should be coming to this next meeting! That would be pretty cool. He’s been writing some really cool stories and poems, such as a conversation between a man waiting in line for the final judgment and the angel St. Peter, where they talk about his life from his point of view (life sucks and God didn’t help me), then the angels’ point of view (you were the one who caused your own problems, not God), and then God’s point of view. It honestly sounds really cool and I’d like to read it sometime. Plus some quantum poetry. Yeah! I hope he can find the time to come to a few of our meetings.

And, on top of all that, I got this really cool idea for a short story as I was walking out of the library. Well, I suppose you could say it’s been bouncing around my head for a little bit longer than that, but it really started to solidify into a story today.

Basically, I thought to myself “what would space combat between single-pilot fighters REALLY be like? Star Wars is pretty cool, but when you really think about it, the real thing (at least, as “real” as spacefighters are) would be completely different. First of all, there would be no sound, since sound can’t travel in a vacuum. Second, the maneuvers would be very different due to the lack of an atmosphere and a zero gravity arena–I imagine they’d fly a lot more like BSG’s Vipers than Xwings. Third, they would probably travel at relativistic speeds, like in Joe Haldeman’s Forever War. I don’t have a particular reason for believing this, other than the notion that the evolution of war in space would probably favor longer range weapons and faster range ships. That, and it would just be cooler.

Joe Haldeman’s space combat scenes, as well as the opening scene in Roger Allen McBride’s The Depths of Time, just really opened me up to a new idea of what space combat could be like. Instead of it being air combat in space, it would involve a lot more physics, more computers, less visualization or reliance on what you can see through a cockpit window, relativistic speeds, high g forces, a lot more danger from relatively small particles (kind of like how a submarine, when it gets hit, gets annihilated), and a ton of other stuff. Basically, something completely different from star wars.

I imagined what one of these fighters would look like, how it would operate, and what would go into this kind of combat. I then started wondering what it would be like to fly one of these things, and then what if, in the course of battle, this guy got thrown out into space at relativistic speeds, and by the time he came back (which to him would only be a few hours) a couple of generations would have passed and the war he’d been fighting was over, replaced with peace! What would that be like?

Basically, that’s when a story really started springing up from this idea. Now, I’m reluctant to start it because I know that I should be finishing stuff instead of starting tons of things and never finishing them. This is an idea for a short story, possibly one I could submit to a few places, and for that reason alone I think it would be good to get started on this. Maybe, like with LZ150207, I could spit out a complete rough draft in one sitting. That is. if I can find the time.

Well, if you’re still reading this incoherent blogfart, all I can say is wow. And thank you. And I hope that I’m not boring you with talking about “me” all the time (though that is one of the basic things that blogging is all about). Now, sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep…

What does it mean when it comes easy?

So, I went on a blind date this evening with a girl who is a fantasy writer / English lit major. It was interesting and fun, and we had a lot to talk about. One of the things that surprised me was a comment she made about writing.

Basically, she said “if it’s easy for you to write something, that’s bad. Good writing is always challenging.”

Now, this contradicts my own view, which is that when you’re writing is good, it comes naturally and so it flows a lot easier.

Which one is right?

OTOH, it’s easier to resort back to cliches and formulaic writing than it is to come up with new phrases and metaphors to describe things, so that would logically mean that the easier writing is, the more cliche it is. OTOH, writing is conveying thoughts, ideas, and imaginary experiences, and the stronger the connection between your imagination and that part of your brain which decides which words to put down on the paper, the easier and more natural it will come.

I could say more, but I have some homework I have to do before I go to bed. What is your take on this? Does your writing get better the easier it becomes, or worse?

Not enough time…

I wish I was writing right now. Grrr!!! Freaking life is too busy!

Maybe this is why I write so much when I do sit down and actually do it. All of that creative energy and whatnot pent in for so long, when it comes out, it comes out in a flood.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Good news! I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people interested in the Quark writing group recently. Looks like we’ll have quite a meeting this Saturday! Plenty of new people!