F – Fine Arts

04/07/2014 9 Comments

FWhen I was considering Master’s Degrees, one of them I was strongly considering was a Master of Fine Arts. One of those interesting degrees where you see a number of people who do the work that is associated without having the degree. And there’s a difference, then, between those who have and have not gotten the degree – right? Maybe? Who knows!

Like with just having a blog, just having a degree in Fine Arts will not automatically make you a writer, because it does not automatically make you write. Writing still involves having the time, and more importantly, taking the time, to write.

So am I happy about my decision, to instead get my Master of Science in Library and Information Science? Bit of a mouthful, anyway. But this gives me options. Jobs I am qualified for. And the hope is, with stability and time comes the opportunity to write. Not perfect, just like other thoughts, but a hope. And it’s a nicely related field, as I get to be surrounded by books and help people work with them every day.

Whereas, with a Master of Fine Arts, with a degree just in writing, the thing you have to do is write. You better hope you’re good. You better hope you’re quick. Well connected. Get a good agent. Self publish. Something. Because otherwise, just like me, you’d find yourself doing other work.

But will I write as well as if I had the degree? In some ways, hopefully not. Otherwise, where is the value in the degree? It might take me longer, or more edits. I may not learn all the tricks of the trade in advance, but will have to do so as I go. But that’s something to accept.

How about you? What do you think about a degree in Fine Arts? Good idea? Bad idea? Any personal stories? Let me know in the comments below!

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E – e-Book

04/05/2014 8 Comments

ESo part of the goal in the A to Z Challenge is to keep the posts short, so I’m not 100% sure why I decided to tackle e-books in a short format! What sorts of topics could I discuss on e-Books?

I think really, the point of this post, to keep it short, really just needs to be, aren’t e-Books neat? The ability to have a whole bunch of books, on a single device. Being able to carry a virtual library with you wherever you go. Great for travel, which is when I get a lot of my reading done. Which might be bad, since I don’t travel enough…

But are e-Books neat enough? The answer is probably, not yet. What do you do when you’re done with it? Keep it forever. Okay… that’s a long time. So no donating it to the local library, no loaning it to a friend, no giving it to someone as a gift. No downsizing your collection – since, after all, it’s portable, so who would want to ever reduce the size of the collection? (Librarian Sarcasm)

Okay, there’s elements of some of those things you can do. And, better yet, there is a growing capacity for checking out e-Books from libraries. However, there is by no means an industry standard to this yet, as some publishers want to charge a ton for electronic access – something that’s done with print journals in databases, as well – because more people can access the book then. Or, they’re limiting access to how many people can have the book at a time. Or they’re adding a limit to the number of times a book can be checked out before it must be bought again. So it isn’t perfect yet.

So while I like my convenient books, I like my free access to books too – maybe especially books I’m not sure about, or books I know I won’t be reading again.

Where are you at? Completely adopted e-Books? Waiting to see? Half and half? And have you checked your local library for e-books? Let me know in the comments below!

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D – Diary

04/04/2014 5 Comments

DAfter hitting on a big, obvious topic yesterday like characters, I thought it would be good to go with a bit more narrow of a writing topic, and that is the Diary. My main thought and question on diaries is, do they still exist? Or at least, anything close to the extent that they may have once?

I think it’s the Internet that has changed this experience. All of a sudden, things people might have once done entirely in private – like keep a Diary, or scrapbooking – have become things that are instead done publicly, constantly, online. This is perhaps even moreso true with the advent of Social Media, and all the things we can do now to share our lives, our interests, with others. However, I would say it goes back further than that.

Because before Social Media as we know it now – Facebook and Twitter and the whole nine yards – there was LiveJournal, and there were discussion forums. People were finding other, like-minded people. From around the globe. So all of a sudden, keeping a Diary about how you’re all alone, or no one gets you, is one way you can approach things… or you can go out there (online), find some like-minded people, and get talking there. I know couples who have met successfully online from great distances, and you know what? It works.

And for keeping a journal or Diary, there was LiveJournal, and you could do so there. And now we have blogs, and we can do all sorts of things anonymously, or with our name attached, however we like it. Or, a little of both. I do a little of both, I suppose.

So I guess the related question is: do we even value this sort of privacy anymore? Maybe the need for a Diary is now, more than ever before. Things that we feel a need to write down, but that maybe we shouldn’t tell the whole world about. Maybe that’s a skill we should be teaching to children these days – writing down some of those thoughts privately, getting them out while still keeping them contained.

What do you think? Have Diaries seen their day? Or are they still being written out there – and should they be? Let me know in the comments below!

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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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