Jonas David's Blog, page 55

Whiteout Wednesdays??

Well, this is a fun idea that I’ve seen some bloggers doing. You are provided with a section of text, and try to make something new out of it by whiting out sections of it. I’ve added my… result, below. Click the link beneath to see the original text. Try it out!

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Source: Whiteout Wednesdays #8

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

I found myself inspired by the end of this book. The final sentence really wraps it up, and I liked the color it gave to all the preceding (and proceeding?) stories. It’s not really a spoiler, but it goes something like this:

“Your efforts will be nothing but a drop in the ocean!” “What is the ocean, but a collection of drops?”

Each story seems to be about a different type of predation. Missionaries prey on natives, a rich and influential man preys on his young assistant, giant corporations prey on consumers and the public, young prey on the elderly, upper class elites prey on the lower class, powerful tribes prey on the weak tribes…

In each story, the character ends up trying to do something about it, trying to make some difference, despite how small their actions may seem when pitted against the entire oppressive world.

It is inspiring, and hopeful while at the same time seeing the world for the brutal and disgusting place that it is. I don’t think I will soon forget this one.

I keep hearing good things about the movie, though I have no idea how they could fit such a story into two hours. I mean, each part would get what, 20 minutes? But, maybe I’ll check it out. I didn’t know until recently that it was the Wachowski’s, and they are usually awesome.

Very recommended!

Running out of thoughts

Is it possible to run out of thoughts? Or are they in infinite supply?

I think you could only run out of thoughts or ideas, if you stopped having new experiences. Every idea is a recombination of things you’ve already seen and heard, or some conclusion reached based on those experiences.

So, if you find yourself running out of ideas, read something new. Watch something new. Go out and do something new. Go someplace new. Then stir those new ingredients up into the soup of ideas in your head and see what floats up.

Don’t let your ideas be strangled to death by the monotony of work and daily life.

Keep experiencing new things, even if they are only in imagination!

Simple goals

Have a goal, a simple achievable one. Not simple as in easy, but simple as in not complex.

‘Write a novel’ is simple (not easy.)

‘Write 3000 words per week, or two chapters, every other week poetry counts as x2 word count, weekends don’t count, and each story submitted counts as an extra thousand words toward the goal’ or some such nonsense, is over complicated and confusing (though not necessarily hard.)

Once you have your simple goal, make a plan to achieve it.

What does writing a novel take? Come up with a simple, straightforward plan to reach  your goal.

“If I write x words per day, my novel will be complete in x months.” Are both of these x’s acceptable to you? Can  you write x words every day? Can you bear to wait x months? Once they are, bam, you’re on your way.

Once you’re on that path, each day will move you closer to your goal. All you have to do is start! (I know that’s not ALL you have to do, I’m being encouraging!)

Do it!

Challenge

Remember when I said I was going to write another novel instead of shorts? Then when I said no wait, I’m going to work on editing? Well, now I’ve got some other plan.

I’m going to sell a story to Clarkesworld, and keep writing stories until I do. If it means I write a novel concurrently with shorts, I’m going to keep writing short stories until I get one accepted there.

My most recent story was rejected, so now it’s on to the next. This one will be better, as will each one after that… eventually I’ll win.

It’s on, Clarkesworld! I’m going to defeat you!

Nested narratives

I’m about 3/4 done with Cloud Atlas and am starting to see the design of it. And it’s really great. At first I thought that the first three, maybe even four narratives had no relevance to the final two, where the action and interest really kicked off. But now, as I begin to see how they relate to each other, I’m thinking in the bigger picture they may make sense together after all.

I’m wondering how the heck this was ever made into a movie, and losing interest in seeing whatever hatchet job they undoubtedly made of it with every chapter I read.

Movies are becoming a storytelling device of the past, I think. They are short stories, flash fiction. Long-form television is the only way to properly tell a story with the depth of a decent novel–and is definitely needed for something with the narrative creativity of Cloud Atlas.

If you do check it out, have patience! Each part is more interesting than the last…

I cog it

I am nearing the end of Cloud Atlas, and the current viewpoint character has a very foreign (to me) dialect. The character is Hawaiian, but in a far future ‘we forgot technology’ situation. Perhaps some of this way of speaking is familiar to Hawaiians, but it’s not to me. And this is not just dialogue, but the narrator. The text is quite dense with unfamiliar idioms and phrases. Yet, I have hardly any difficulty understanding it.

Brains are good at figuring out contextual clues and filling in the gaps. I only had to think for about two seconds that ‘cog’ was ‘understand’ and that ‘beutsome’ was ‘beautiful’ and ‘hushly’ was ‘quiet’, and so on.  This is just one of an endless stream of reasons that you don’t need to do so much telling in your stories. Readers aren’t dumb. They will figure it out just fine. I didn’t need someone providing definitions, I just figured it out based on the context of what was happening. I could imagine a lesser writer feeling the need to insert a ‘fish out of water’ character to go ‘huh? what?’ at every new word so it could be explained to them.

This is the bane of many TV shows. Just pay attention next time you watch Law and Order, or some other basic cable TV show. One cop will say ‘The victim has deep lacerations on the abdomen.’ Then a second later, another one will say ‘He slashed her belly,’ to explain it to the supposed dummies who don’t know what a laceration or abdomen is. It happens every time anyone uses a word with more than two syllables. Pay attention, and you’ll notice it, though you might not be as irritated by it as me…

Anyway, all that is to say that over-explaining–or really, any explaining when you can avoid it–is not good for your story!

Website

I’ve decided to make one to host all my unpublished stories. They’re just sitting there, on my hard drive, dozens of them, a few of them even decent reads! Why not put them somewhere readily available?

So, in the near future there will be a fancy new website for folks to click on and see fictional things by me.

How exciting!

Submitted ? ?

I have broken my streak of donothingness and submitted a story to Clarkesworld magazine!

This is mostly a symbolic gesture, as I am well aware that the story is not of Clarkesworld caliber, but I wanted to get my feet back in the water and do SOMETHING. And since Clarkesworld has the fastest response time (around 3 days usually) that’s the one I went with.

Once it’s rejected, I may think about putting it up here somewhere. My blog might need a bit of reformatting in order to be able to host stories better. I’ve got a lot of them which, if not amazing, area at least readable! Someone should read them!

Look forward to that, if you are interested…

Dream for the collective

I feel like my purpose is to tell stories. But what kind of purpose is that? Isn’t it just a waste of time? A self-indulgence, or enabling of others to self-indulge? I disagree (of course, I would have to.)

I propose that stories serve the same purpose to society as dreams do to individuals. They are invented scenarios that allow us to imagine ourselves in situations we’ve never been in before. They allow us to prepare for happenings that we have no way of having the experience to deal with. George Orwell dreamed of a totalitarian world of horror, and now, because of his dream of a scenario that we’ve not experienced, we may be better prepared to deal with it if it comes our way. The same can be said for any other story dreamed into the collective consciousness of society.

Your ideas are not frivolous or pointless, you are a dreamer for the world. It’s your job not to hold back, and to put every crazy idea that you can think of out there for the rest of humanity to experience.

Go for it!