C – Characters

04/03/2014 12 Comments

CIn all of my thinking and planning for the A to Z Challenge, I have found that C is a pretty easy letter to work with. Almost too easy – you end up with too many things to choose from. There are a few letters like that. And maybe why I’m thinking about it is because today’s topic matches what my wife and I are doing on Comparative Geeks: we’re going A to Z characters.

When it comes to writing, though, characters are kings. Even in non-fictional pieces, the subject of the piece often ends up as the character, as we get the history, or current goings-on. Maybe not fully anthropomorphized, but getting there. But when you get to fiction, a story needs its characters, perhaps even more than those characters need a story. I’ve read absurdist literature. It’s doable.

I do a lot of my thinking and writing about Science Fiction, and Fantasy, and it can be easy to get carried away with these sorts of genres… lost in ideas, in world-building, in all of those sorts of gritty details to make the world seem right. Carried away too much, and the characters fall flat, and the reader ends up unengaged. You want a story your reader can get lost in… but for whatever reason, it’s through the exploration and experiences of the characters that we get lost.

Which means the most common sort of character is the one that is a stand-in for the audience, or the one who is new to the world being presented. Whether it’s just the new guy or rookie, or the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court, this character is essential. You don’t want to make them too blank – this is actually something that happens a lot in video games. To give the player the control of the situation, to feel like they are this blank slate character, the character does not speak throughout the game themselves. I think the Nintendo games especially have a lot of this – Link never really gets any lines in the Zelda games!

But even, think of non-fiction, or better yet – think of political speeches. They always seem to reach a point where they need to personalize it, where they have to bring up some real (probably) people in a real place, experiencing whatever it is they’re talking about. They can give you facts and ideology all day, but they give you that character to latch on to as well.

Because let’s face it – characters are a fundamental to stories.

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B – Blog

04/02/2014 12 Comments

When I was in college, and answering the question of “what I wanted to do when I grew up,” my answer was inevitably writer or author or something of the type. The follow-up question became “do you have a blog?” Blogs had become the big thing, of a sudden, it seemed. I had written some travel stories, mainly, in a Live Journal… I had joined others in creating fiction on forums… Social Media was just catching its stride with the advent of Facebook… I had competed in NaNoWriMo… but no, I did not have a blog.

After college, there were a number of years where I did little or no writing, and it was during these years it might have been nice to have had a blog. However, even as I started my Master’s and they had us create a blog (the very foundations of this blog here), I did not use this for the writing I could have been doing. You can see a big gap in the archives from the blog’s start, in 2009, and when I later took a course on blogging that had me blogging more in earnest.

B

However, a blog is really more of a delivery method, and also an interface. It’s not a driving force in-and-of itself. Having a blog does not make one write. You can see this in any number of blogs which start up, have some steam, and then just lose it and disappear. Honestly, this blog has looked like that at a number of points in its lifetime.

So the question asking me if I had a blog was like asking if I used Word, or if I shared my fiction on Facebook. It’s about getting known and presence, or about where and how you write. I hope now that people are forming this question more carefully when they ask young students, so they don’t just feel dumb for not having a blog. Because having a blog does not make you a writer. Writing does. Having something to write is what helps you write. And, if you figure out what that something is and it happens to be a blog, make a blog. Look for the right place to blog. I still hold that someday I am going to write fiction and put it on Tumblr. But holding the Tumblr real-estate down has not made me write the stories.

It’s the overall audience-finding, content-creator connection to content-consumer aspect of a blog which is powerful for a writer, and these sorts of benefits can come from good branding and a good social media presence in general. Twitter can be huge, and lots of writers are hanging out there, waiting for you to read their books. Should you have a blog? Maybe. I think the main answer I would give is have a blog if you’re going to write the blog: a blog without content is a webpage. You should maybe have one of those. And blogging, as a public, interactive thing, brings along interactive, social media elements that are important. But be ready for that.

What do you think? Do you need to have a blog as a writer? Let me know what you think in the comments below!

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A – Author

04/01/2014 17 Comments

A

To kick off the A to Z Challenge, I gave myself an easy one. My topic for the challenge (as you can check out here) is writing, and the world of writing, and so there is not much more critical to this than the author. Books don’t write themselves, as I’m sure someone in the history of the world has said before, and so it goes.

The question often comes up: at what point can you call yourself a writer? The answer tends to have to do with writing – do you write? And in a lot of ways, a lot of the time, there are folks who are writers who are not paid for it, or not paid yet, not published yet, what have you. Take most bloggers, for instance. A consistent blogger might not be paid – and power to those who are! – but they are writing.

However, is there a difference between this and being an author? Is Author, perhaps, the concept that goes along with Being Published? Being paid for your writing? Or maybe it has to do more with something specific, about writing specific sorts of things. Authors write novels. Or wait, are those novelists? Authors can write short stories, after all. Or what about screenplays? Plays plays? Poetry? Or are there other words for these sorts of people – playwrights and poets?

Clearly, this seemingly simple term needs some help. How about Merriam-Webster?

A person who has written something; especially : a person who has written a book or who writes many books.

–http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/author

So I don’t know if that’s the answer. One who has written something is an author; they might also be a more specific sort of author, like a blogger or a poet. But still an author.

What about you – what do you think of if someone were to tell you they were an author? What would your assumption be about their work, or what questions would you ask them? Let me know in the comment section down below!

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Searching Social Media

03/25/2014 3 Comments

So an interesting question came up and I learned something. And maybe you can help.

How do you search social media?

Hashtags were added by users – and later adopted by the companies, and have been a growing thing. From their start on Twitter, you can now see and use them on Google+, Tumblr, Facebook, and other places. And of course, there’s the tags on blogs and other things that are user-generated attempts at keywords and searchability. However, even if we assume that what you are looking for are posts where users are self-defining their content – say, with the upcoming Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle this weekend (#eccc) – how do you best search these things?

So with the question came this link, so I can’t say I found it myself: http://guides.library.cornell.edu/socialmedia They don’t necessarily have all the answers, but they did post the important question: Twitter only has the last 10 days searchable! Living in a 140-character world may be bad, but living in a world with a ten-day life-span? That’s really rough. 

 

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Children’s Literature: Is it Even a Thing? – The Sunday Re-Blog

03/23/2014 Leave a comment

While I have talked a lot about genres like Science Fiction or Fantasy… there’s different ways to slice the genre world. What about YA or Children’s lit? Often with a lot of overlap to the science fiction/fantasy world.

So here’s a great piece from someone working on their PhD in the field… it’s part of a response to an annoying post by someone else, and is a lead-in to more content over on the blog. Definitely give the Part Time Monster a read!

Oh, and a huge conversation started on the subject, as well! Check out the comments!

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