One Thousand And One Parsecs

I really hope I get into this class!!! (and other thoughts on Brandon Sanderson)

MAN!!!!!!! Today was the first priority date to sign up for classes, and every slot except for one filled up in English 318 section 3 (the one taught by Brandon Sanderson)!!!! MAN!!!!! I SO want to get this class!!!!!! My sister told me she’d try to hold it for me, but last I heard she had a hold on her account…and so did two other senior friends that I asked! Well, if I fail to make the date, I suppose I can try the add-drop card approach. And I’ve already emailed him (not just a fan email–I asked him if it would be alright if I worked on this novel in his class). Many of my friends in the writing group have taken his class, some multiple times, so I suppose that it’s possible…I don’t know. I’m stressing over it.

I’ve heard Sanderson interviewed on a couple of writing podcasts that I listen to. The most notable one, IMO, was Adventures in Sci Fi publishing. Apparently, he’s been doing a book tour out here in the West with Dave Wolverton (maybe that’s why he hasn’t responded to my email 🙂 )

He said a couple of interesting things on the podcast. The first thing was really frightening, actually (I forget if it was him or Dave Wolverton). One of the two of them said that the major publishers are so paranoid that they’re rejecting new authors who even have the support of big name reviewers. Apparently, a publisher in NY turned down a new sci fi novelist who had his draft reviewed by one of the big name book reviewers over there, as well as having other credentials. Ouch. As an amateur writer who only has vague, nebulous dreams about getting published…this is really scary. And, even though I’ve attempted to write a novel like five or six times, I have yet to succeed in even finishing a rough draft. So…I’ve got a lot of road ahead of me. And I have no idea how long it will take–decades, maybe. Yikes!

The other thing was about him and science fiction. Someone on the podcast asked him if he planned on writing science fiction, and he said that he just wasn’t well versed enough to participate in the conversation. That’s really interesting that he called it a “conversation.” Coming from one of the social sciences, it really struck a chord in me. Academia is like a conversation, and the important thing isn’t about being right so much as it is being relevant. You need to do a lit review and know what the debate is like, what the sides are on the issues–otherwise, either you’ll waste your time with research that’s already been done, or you’ll end up answering a question that nobody is asking.

So, what I took from that, is that I really need to read more sci fi, if I want to write it! Man, as if classes weren’t enough…but this is something I love, so it shouldn’t be hard. Maybe I should set some kind of goal, like one novel per month? I have no idea. But yeah, I want to write something that’s worthwhile, and possibly get it published eventually. Like, if I can…

UPDATE: ok, so in the time that it’s taken to write all of this (interspersed with interruptions, like driving my friends down to a disgustingly huge Halloween party at the Hollywood house and hanging out with some of my other friends), I just heard from my sister Kate! She was able to hold the class for me!!!!! YAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I’M IN!!!!!!!!!! WOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1,233 words on this hot date with my science fiction novel

I’m past the part that I was hung up on, and now I’m in a good part. The story is advancing quickly, and it’s really coming together quite naturally. Yay! I didn’t write yesterday, but I more than made up for it today.

I love it how when you have vague ideas before you sit down and write, they come together in a way that makes sense and can even surprise you by showing an aspect of the story that you hadn’t considered. It’s like that when you’re writing about the different charactes’ feelings, and then as you consider what the character should be feeling at that time, it leads you to think a little more about how this character relates to the other character, which helps you to flesh out the characterization and the story around them. It’s great. That’s why I don’t go into writing fiction with a clear, well laid out plan of what’s going to happen. I like to let the story itself surprise me.

And so, now that you all know that things are going well, I’m going to sign out. I REALLY need sleep. I’m awake as long as I’m moving, but when I sit down, I start to get droopy eyed. I realized this today as I was driving to a family get together in Salt Lake city. Fortunately, I have some good ocremix techno to keep me awake. But now, I’m getting loopy.

Goodnight all!

Yay! 790 words!

This is going to be really short, because it’s very late and I’ve got to sleep (preferably not in church tomorrow). I picked up the novel tonight and got another 790 words in. Yay! So I’m not stuck as bad as I’d thought! I’ll just have to rewrite that one part at some time. And I’m at this really good scene, too, where some pivotal things happen! The first contact / cultural shock continues, with all kinds of misunderstandings and complications that set the stage for what comes next! Yay! What fun! If I weren’t so dang tired, I’d just keep on writing!

Now, I’d better get to bed before Aneeka comes online again and starts chastising me for neglecting my sleep…

One of the first stories I ever wrote

I was looking around in some of the old files that I have, and I came across this old piece. It’s one of the first stories that I ever wrote–probably the first piece of creative fiction that I wrote outside of school. I remember writing this! It was back in 5th grade, so that would make me about ten years old! I wrote it on the family computer–an old 386 that died during y2k (well, not really, but we had to use a fix to get around it, and then we forgot how to use the fix and my Dad gave it away. Gave it away!!! What I wouldn’t give to still have that computer!!!!!). I wrote it back when I was reading books on African wildlife and the Goodals, and my goal was to become a naturalist someday. A lot of that comes out if you read between the lines here. Of course, I had already decided that I would be a fiction writer, but that would be a part-time thing–I’d still need a day job.

I think the real significant thing about this story was that it was the first one that I did independent of school. I was really fortunate in that my elementary school had a strong creative writing program, so I’d already “written” a dozen or so books already–mostly stories that were about 500 to 1,000 words long, with pictures that I drew. This one was about 3,500 words long, and when I finally finished it, I felt really tired and really proud of myself! I don’t remember how long it took, but it took several weeks, and possibly even months. This story marked the starting point in my life of writing creative fiction on my own. After this, I went on to write about five more hyena stories, then I started a science fiction piece based off of one of my imaginary universes, and then, after maybe a couple of other projects, I started my first attempt at a novel in the 8th grade. Ever since then, I’ve always had this writing bug. Even when I was on my mission I had it, and at one point even scribbled a few chapters for an allegorical story based on Lehi’s dream.

So, you could say that this Hyena story was a milestone for me. It’s not something I’d try to publish now, but I do think it offers a wonderful view into what I was thinking and writing back then as a budding creative writer. Enjoy!

A couple of awesome Quark meetings

So, this week we had not one but two Quark writing group meetings. And they both were really good! There was a surprisingly good turnout at each one, and I think that everyone went away with some good feedback for their stories. Plus, some of the newer guys are getting motivated to write stuff of their own, so we’re really having some success!

The general feedback I got from several of the members was that we needed to either split the group or meet more often. I added in my own idea into that, which was to lower the number of stories we look at. Drek says that the ideal size for the writing group is about six. I think that we can still do good with ten or twelve people, but we’ve got to add more time for the stories–which means that we only look at four stories instead of six.

And actually, during both of these meetings, four seemed just about right for what we were doing. A half hour for each story seems like enough for everyone to say everything they wanted to but short enough to keep up focused and on task. Or, rather, to keep me focused and on task, because I’m probably the biggest tangent starter in the group!

Tuesday’s meeting was interesting because, to my knowledge, everyone there was either a freshman or new to the group this semester. And we had about ten people, and an excellent meeting! Word has been getting out about us.

Also, I think that the group is doing really well because we all seem to be doing a good job taking criticism. There was this one story this week that I really had a lot of criticism for, and I was a little bit worried about hurting the author’s feelings, but she really wanted to hear it and really ate it up, then thanked me later. There were a couple of other stories today where people had a LOT of criticism, on a lot of different things in the story, but I think that the authors came away with a much better idea of what they were doing. Hillary in particular said afterwards that the writing meeting today really helped to point her in the right direction with one problem she didn’t know how to fix, which was how to have an obnoxious narrator at certain parts and third person limited POV at others.

And really, I think the key thing for the meetings themselves it the quality of the discussion. It’s better to give criticism that will be helpful and useful than it is to hold back for fear of possibly hurting someone’s feelings. Of course, you need to be careful in the delivery of that criticism, but if you’re talking about the story itself and not the writer personally, I don’t think there really should ever be an issue. And really, the serious writers are going to WANT criticism, so the key is to make it worth their time. That’s what’s going to really keep this club alive and powerful–useful criticism.

Still, I wonder if we could raise our ability to critically read fiction. Maybe if we did like the book club, and had the bookstore discount certain books like Strunk and White’s Elements of Style or Orson Scott Card’s Character and Plot, then encouraged everyone to read them (and yes, I know that OSC is the “nemesis” of the writing group, but he does have some very good and useful things to say about writing). Maybe we should team up with the English department and get some faculty to share with us a short discussion on fiction and how to read it critically. Maybe we should get Brandon Sanderson to come and speak at one of our meetings. I don’t know. I’ll see what I can do!

But I also think it’s important that we do some things informally as well–such as having social activities outside of writing meetings. I hear that that’s what really got the writing group solidified in the beginning, and you can still see that in the strong friendships between the oldtimers (as well as the HUGE number of them who got married thru Quark!) . I’m encouraging people to hold different writing parties for the month of November, where we can just hang out, write, have word count races, talk about our frustrations and the good times, etc. I’m going to try to host one or two up here at the FLSR, but it’s a pretty noisy place so I don’t know if I can find the space. But hopefully, it will work.

So, things are going VERY well–and I think that most of it has more to do with what everyone else has done and is still doing than anything I’ve done of myself. I’m just providing the framework–the dates, deadlines, the space, and the reminders–but YOU guys are making it come to life! Thanks to all of you!

OLL

I thought this was supposed to be fun…

Well, it is. At least, the net effect is fun. But the day to day writing can be kind of…difficult.

I’ve made some progress in the last few days, even though I neglected to write about it here. Mostly, it’s just been between classes or insanely late at night, so I haven’t had time to write any blog entries. But I’ll write a quick one tonight.

In the last section that I wrote, I introduced this new character who believes that Ian is some kind of a holy figure and decides to become his disciple. The feedback I got from the writing group was that the way I introduced Master Elijah from his own POV was very good, so I decided to do basically the same thing. That is, from a limited 3rd person point of view, give a very brief summary of the character and any aspects of his life story that tie directly into what is actually going on in the action. The result is a short synopsis of the character’s life that transitions nicely into the action in the particular section, without feeling too info-dumpish.

I tried to do the same thing here, and threw in a couple of ideas about cleavages and tribal friction that we’ve been learning in my Political Systems of the Middle East class. I want to take a lot of the ideas of stuff that we’re learning in that class and apply it to this fictional society. I don’t want the culture to exactly parallel Arab culture, but to take enough aspects from it that it gets the same flavor. Besides, it’s kind of a fun testing ground for experimenting with the ideas that we’re learning in class. And it’s an excellent class, btw. I’d highly recommend it, if you’re interested at all in the modern Middle East. PLSC 357 with Dr. Bowen.

However, I was very disappointed with how this section turned out. I wrote it in about three chunks over three days, but each time that I sat down to write, I was doing it more to reach the 500 words a day goal than because I felt inspired to do it. Basically, I sat down and forced myself to write. And…it wasn’t as fun as it usually is. The words didn’t flow. I was falling asleep at the computer in the LRC. Things didn’t seem to be meshing together properly. It was WAY too info-dumpish, and I had to make up a lot of the information there on the spot, which made it even more difficult because I had to force myself to start coming up with new ideas. It hurt a bit, but I came up with a few good ones. Hopefully I can develop them more and better a little bit later.

Now, I suppose that you can’t just expect writing to be fun all of the time. It does take work, which can in some ways be unpleasant. And it’s not practical to just wait to feel inspired all of the time. At the same time, you really do have to enjoy what you do, and you can’t force inspiration. Ideas will come and hit you at times when you aren’t expecting them, and you have to be ready to take them and fit them into a framework, otherwise they just slip through your fingers.

So, I suppose that good writing is some kind of a balance between hard work and pure inspiration. And the direction my story is taking me at this time is hard work.

And I’m willing to go that way–so long as it makes sense to do that. Tonight, for example, it’s freaking late and I need to get some sleep, so I probably won’t write in my novel tonight. It just doesn’t make much sense to me to trudge through the required wordcount and come up with some barely cohesive prose and crappy story elements. It makes much more sense to me to work myself up to being excited about the next part, and then writing 1,000 words of good prose and good story tomorrow.

Of course, the balance to this is that if I keep putting off writing, the ideas that I have will die. So, I really can’t just do this all the time. Sometimes, you’ve just got to trudge through it. But…I don’t know. I just hope I can keep this story going strong until it finishes.

(btw, this dilemma is why I chose as a teenager that I would not become a professional writer. I knew enough to know that if writing became my main source of income, I wouldn’t enjoy it anymore. At the same time…I can’t just expect to reap the fruits when I didn’t nourish the seeds. So…I don’t know.)

680 words and some updates

680 words tonight. I did stay up a bit later than I’d wanted to, but meh, I don’t have class until 1:00. It really didn’t take that long to write–what took up the time was the few games I played, and also the surfing around wikipedia and other random places on the web. I am sooooo ADHD. But yeah, the story is still rolling and it shouldn’t be that hard to get at least 500 words in every day.

I’m reading Mistborn my Brandon Sanderson right now for the Quark book club, and it is really good! It’s been a while since I’ve gotten into a book like this! The world and the magic system are interesting, the characters drive the story and are also interesting, especially the main character Vin, the conflict is pretty intense and the good guys aren’t involnurable. Each new chapter makes me want to read the next chapter, and I’m really interested to see how Vin changes and grows, and what happens to her. Plus, the magic system and other elements of the story have really stoked my imagination. It’s a good book! I’m looking forward to discussing it at the Quark reading group meeting this next November!

Speaking of which, November is nanowrimo, and I’m a little bit worried about it. We haven’t planned out too much for the month as a writing group, it looks like we’re just going to have a few informal writing parties at each others’ apartments, and probably some kind of a party at the end of the month where we share our stories with each other and do other fun stuff. But really, that’s probably all we need. It’s going to be crazy–and I’m not even doing nanowrimo this year!

Yay! My friend Reigheena won a contest for her short story! Good for her! I hope things just keep getting better for her. And man, she’s about to have a baby as well! Crazy! Good luck with everything!

I’ve been reading Aneeka’s story in any of my nonexistent free time. She sent me five chapters but I’ve read only two so far. I was really impressed with the dialogue, pacing, characters, and setting in her rewrite of the first chapter. And…I’d say more, except that I know that she reads this blog. Since she’s pretty sensitive about anyone criticizing it at this point, I figure I’d better not go into much depth here. Sensitive, as in I sometimes worry she’ll jump in front of a train or something…before she sends me the rest of the story! My goal is to eventually read the whole thing. Hopefully, that will be before it’s published, but we’ll see. We shall see.

We’ve got another writing meeting tomorrow. We’ve only got four stories this time, so we shouldn’t be rushed at all. I just hope that it wasn’t a mistake to schedule the next meeting only a couple of days later, on Saturday. Several of the members seem to favor meeting together more often, and I’m hoping that if we do that, we can lower the number of stories we look at at each meeting and not be so rushed. But secretly, I’m kind of worried that I’ll lose track of the schedule and miss some of these meetings. I’m so ADHD, it might just happen…

AUGH!!!!!!!!!

Shoot! Today was a crazy day! I feel almost like it was a waste! The last couple of days, I was thinking about how great it would be once the weekend comes, how I’d have tons of free time to write in my novel, and how many thousands of words I would write, how awesome it would be. But now, it’s the end of the day, and I haven’t even written anything at all!

It’s weird. I think that it’s a tendency that we all have–procrastination. Some people have it worse than others. I’m extremely horrible at it. I read on a photoblog I read that we spend about five years in our lifetimes just waiting for buses, subways, cars, doctors appointments, etc. If you could add up all the time I’ve spent in procrastination, it would probably add up to five already! The weird thing is…this is something I actually enjoy doing. Why procrastinate THAT??

It reminds me of a priesthood lesson we had once in church last semester. This guest speaker came to speak with us on the difficult subjects, like chastity, pornography, etc. He started out by discussing a conversation he had with a neurologist once, about how we are hardwired, through our brain, to try and get a maximum output with a minimum input. Basically, the idea is that we are naturally disinclined to do the productive, creative things that require effort, and naturally inclined to waste time on mindless activities that give us basic, low-level pleasure. It might be a LOT more satisfying to do something creative, but that requires so much effort to do that we have a natural impulse to avoid doing it–and to waste time instead on video games, tv, staring at the wall, and other stupid stuff.

The other weird thing is that even though I did almost all of my homework yesterday, I spent the whole day today stressed out about that tiny little bit that I hadn’t yet done. It was very, very weird. I did about three or four hours of homework yesterday, and had only about an hour (half an hour of focused effort, but I never focus) left. I KNEW that I had a significantly lesser load of homework, and yet, despite that fact, I still felt weighed down in the back of my mind! All day! AUGH!!!

So, I guess I’ve learned two things from this experience: the urge to procrastinate is not confined to unpleasant tasks, and that no matter how much or how little work you put off, it will still weigh on the back of your mind.

Freak!

Well, there is some good news though. I have NO homework that I need to do tomorrow! (except blog in Arabic, but that’s fun and isn’t strictly necessary for my Arabic homework anyways) I am FREE! What’s more, the day is almost totally open! At least, as far as Sundays are open (and believe it or not, Sundays are actually fairly busy for us students). What’s more, it’s not all that late right now! I’m going to go to bed before 2:00, which means that I’ll be able to wake up in the morning and actually be awake! I’ll actually get sufficient sleep! So, tomorrow is looking good. Even though I didn’t write today, I will spend lots of time writing tomorrow, inshallah.

freaking tired

Yes, I got the minimum in. Just barely. I guess you could call it 500 words. In any case, I’m becoming incoherent, so the time has come to get some sleep. Man, if I could have a super power it would be the ability to go indefinitely without sleep, and still be perfectly functional! I suppose my body is trying to tell me something, though. They’ll probably come up with a study sometime that shows that sleep deprivation robs years off of your life. Something like that. But when I think of that, I think of all the bad things that I could be doing, like drugs, alcohol, smoking, etc, and I think “well, this is my pet vice. And it’s not even all that bad. Even though it is hurting me.” And then I start to wonder why it is that we all humans seem to have our pet vices, how it’s part of human nature to have at least one irrational stupid thing that we do that hurts us more than anything. And I ponder that for a little while, until I’m distracted by something else. But yeah, 500 words tonight. And I’m probably going to put a story bible together in the not too distant future, so that I can have some good direction. Occassionally I’ll throw out words and forget them a few pages later, so I need to remember. We’ll see. And now I’m getting to where typing is difficult. So I’ll have to write later. Except for yesterday, I’ve been doing 500 words per day. Yay! Will continue. But after sleep. Sleep…

More on worldbuilding: specifically, religion

So, in this novel that I’m writing, I have this quasi-primitive tribal medieval culture that develops on an isolated planet. An important part of the story is actually creating this culture, figuring it out, how it works and how it doesn’t, etc. And one of the most important parts of this particular culture is the religion. The idea that I have is that this culture was basically anarchic and unstable until a religion developed that established some norms, a basic system of justice and morality, an hierarchy, and a value for knowledge. The problem is: how do you invent a fictional religion?

I was kind of worried about this a week or so ago. I was getting to the part in the book where the religion starts to influence the characters and the plot, and I still hadn’t figured out some of the basic beliefs of these people. When I did start to write this religion, it ended up sounding way too…Arab. And even though this story is influenced by a lot of the stuff that I’m studying in Political Science and MESA (Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic), I DON’T want this novel to be about a bunch of Arabs on another planet. These people are unique. Plus, as I’m learning now, the problems in the Middle East are completely different than anything that could possibly develop on this planet. However, there are some similarities, and some of the conflicts are going to be similar to the ones that we face today.

So, when I saw that I was patterning things too much off of my own ideas of Arab culture and religion, and not enough off of original ideas, I thought that I had to go back and completely draw out the religion in my head–that I needed to come up with all the specific details of it, and that these details had to be sufficiently unique and different from anything else that they would be truly “original.” The result was that I started toying around with some crazy ideas that sounded pretty weird, and since they didn’t tie in directly with where I’m going with the story, I started feeling a little bit embarrassed when I thought of putting them on paper.

So, I wasn’t sure what to do. Then, the other day I had this gchat with Aneeka, and she let me bounce off some of these ideas off of her. It was actually very helpful! She offered some ideas of her own, which got me thinking about directions I could take things. More than that, it got me excited about the whole subject again. I think one of the basic reasons you write stories is because of a sense of wonder about the world, or an idea of it. Without that, it just doesn’t have the same life to it.

But, more important, the more I got to talking with her, the more I realized that it WASN’T important to answer every question–or make the religion completely unique. Instead, it would actually be BETTER to focus on the basic concepts, like morality, justice, and good vs. evil, that can be found in EVERY religion. That way, instead of being this strange, weird thing that no-one can relate to, it can be sufficiently unique, and yet have something that people from ANY religion can relate to. I don’t need to know every detail of this religion, just the basic cosmology, history, and the moral code. I need to touch on things like the afterlife, accountability, the nature of God, etc, but only lightly. In fact, it’s better not to try and control it. The important thing, when you come down to it, is how does this religion affect the way that people see themselves, their world, and the way they live their lives.

Other than that, the writing is generally going well–when I have the time to do it. Speaking of which, I have two minutes to dash from the HBLL to my Philosophy class. See ya!