Bryan Young's Blog, page 8

All Art Has An Agenda

All art has an agenda. Some people say that like it's a bad thing, but I'm here to tell you that it's a feature, not a bug. Every piece of writing tells you something about the perspective or worldview of the author. Even the absence of "an agenda" is an agenda.What brought this on recently? I've seen too many people online upset that the new Ghostbusters film is pushing an agenda of gender equality because every member of the new crew is a female. I honestly can't wrap my head around ho...

The Importance of Role Models

Kurt Vonnegut wrote at length in many books and essays about his writing process. He would sit at his Smith-Corona typewriter, smoking Pall Malls like a chimney. It was easy for me to imagine myself just like him. It was so easy that every time I sit at my typewriter I yearn for a cigarette.

I've never smoked a cigarette in my life.

It's a powerful thing, reading about people who seem like you, doing the thing you want to do.

Sometimes, I'll be writing in my coffee shop at my computer, feeling t...

A Great Opening

I read a lot of books and for the opening to stick with me as something that needs to be revisited is a rare thing. When I find one, I love going back, line by line, and figuring out how it works and how it functions. This week we're going to take a look at the opening paragraph of Robert Heinlein' Starship Troopers. It does a lot of things really well, but more than anything it demands that you keep reading.

Writing an opening to a book is hard. You need to grab readers with your very first s...

Anatomy of a Scene: Raiders of the Lost Ark

I've been meaning to start doing stuff like this and I figured there was no better time to start than now.
There are a lot of scenes in a lot of movies and books that just knock my socks off every time I see them. Talking about them lights a fire under my ass that makes me want to just write and write and write. They're perfectly written, perfectly executed, and just perfect. 
So I wanted to highlight some of them here and try to explain why they give me creative nourishment. 
Many of...

Nobody Knows Anything

“Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.” --William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade

In this quote, William Goldman was referring to the motion picture field, but I think the same can be easily said of storytelling in general, of books and movies, of video games and shorts. Anytime someone has a creative idea, a new story to tell, no one ha...

False Starts

False starts are a thing I assume every writer has to deal with.

Sometimes these false starts happen because you merely tried starting the story in the wrong place. Other times, you're trying to get a story out into the world that you haven't completely thought through and you've picked the wrong opening because you didn't really know where you were heading.

And sometimes, you just find that the story just wasn't working the way you hoped, in the same way an experiment might go wrong. You put a...

Always Be Learning

Lawrence Kasdan once said that "being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life." Perhaps some writers don't have to work as hard at learning and studying as I do, or as hard as I strive to, anyway, but it's something I think is important for writers of all skill levels. We can always get better and that's because we can always be learning.
I go out of my way to discover what works for other writers in their process and understanding of the craft so that I may...

Writing Advice from Kurosawa

At the moment, I'm working on a screenplay in addition to drafting my 11th novel. It's how I learned the art of story structure and how the moving parts of a story worked. I wrote or co-wrote a dozen screenplays before I turned to write my first novel and it was an invaluable experience.

Granted, the first thing people asked after they read my early drafts of my early work was, "You were a screenwriter, weren't you?"

It showed. They really are different media, and it can be easy to ease too far...

About Graham Greene...

There are writers I love to read, regardless of what they've written. It doesn't matter what genre it's in, what length, how it's published, I just want to experience their work.

Graham Greene is one of those writers. I was introduced to him through the movies that he wrote, principally The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles. Coincidentally, I wrote about that movie on StarWars.com here. After that, I read his book Dr. Fischer of Geneva or The Bo...

That Little Voice

Sometimes when I write there's a little voice that tells me that no one is going to care about what I have to say. It asks me who is going to read this blog about writing, let alone care about what's written there. It asks me why anyone would want to read my prose at all, let alone pay for it.

It's a constant voice of doubt.

Hell, even as I'm writing this, I'm telling that little voice to shut the hell up every time it suggests I delete all of this and start this post over from scratch and pick...