I learned to write when I was "young." As a sixth grader — all of eleven years old — I developed a fixation on The Lord of the Rings. And also Dungeons and Dragons. With character sheets on one corner of the desk and hand-drawn sketches of a "hobbit swashbuckler" in the other corner, I put all my attention to the beautiful blank page before me: the story.
Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
Sunday, December 12, 2010
New Intersession Course on Writing the Human in Science Fiction
For the Johns Hopkins Intersession, I'll be teaching a course on how to write believable human characters in the fantastical worlds of science fiction. Through workshops and readings, we'll address questions of how to develop a realistic and believable character who inhabit worlds that may involve aliens, time travel, and intelligent robots. As we do so, we'll be examining issues of how the physical form affects the spiritual and mental identity of the individual, gender and sexuality, and memory versus reality.
If you'd like to learn more about this course, take a look at our course website: TheHuman.12Writing.com. If you've already registered for the course, you can go ahead to the User Login to set up your profile on the assignments homepage. You should have received the enrollment key via e-mail from ISIS. If you haven't, please Contact Me so I can forward that on to you. Be sure to include your full name in the online form so I can confirm your enrollment with ISIS.
If you'd like to learn more about this course, take a look at our course website: TheHuman.12Writing.com. If you've already registered for the course, you can go ahead to the User Login to set up your profile on the assignments homepage. You should have received the enrollment key via e-mail from ISIS. If you haven't, please Contact Me so I can forward that on to you. Be sure to include your full name in the online form so I can confirm your enrollment with ISIS.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
January 15, 2010: Freewriting with Heroes and Fruitcake
Everybody start your writing utensils for the first Friday Prompt of the New 1-2-Writing!
We’ll send these out every Friday to all Newsletter subscribers. To post your work for feedback, please sign up for our Member’s Area.
Now then, Set your timer before reading further (10 minutes for this one), and have your paper or keyboard ready. For this prompt, you’ll write down some “facts” for the story, and only after you’ve written down these facts should you go on and read the prompt itself...
Now, the “facts” of your story:
Imagine, for a moment, that you live in a mystical, magical land very different from our own. It can be either a science fiction place with starships and a version of Microsoft Word that doesn't crash, or it could be a fantasy place out of Harry Potter where enchanted quills write stories of their own using lambskin parchment and black dye from Endless Ink, Inc. Or, if you like, it could be a world very much like our own, except with one subtle change (think The Simpsons: there's a scene where the weather is terrible, it rains every day, but each raindrop is a sweet sugary donut).
Write down the name of this world, and the one key difference between this world and our own.
That done, imagine for yourself a kind of "hero" for this world. It can be an ordinary person with a special determination to "do right" by combating the scourge of donuts that have devoured the local weather, or it can be a superhero with some special power such as the ability to impose Linux stability on Microsoft systems with a wave of the hand.
Write the name of this character and the one "special power" or "special determination" which makes this individual a hero.
And now, The Prompt:
Your hero is getting married tomorrow. It will be a very traditional wedding. And the in-laws have brought a loaf of their famous fruitcake as a gift to the bride-and-groom-to-be. But there's a catch: your hero is very, very, allergic to fruitcake. And they've already set a healthy slice on our plucky hero's salad plate. All eyes, now, are on the hero to pronounce this fruitcake delicious or...
(now write as fast as you can for ten minutes)
Happy Writing!
Ryan
Be sure to sign up for our Member’s Area so you can post your story for comments – all freewriting feedback will be positive and reassuring.
If you have received this e-mail in error or would prefer not to receive such e-mails in the future, please reply back with REMOVE in the subject line.
We’ll send these out every Friday to all Newsletter subscribers. To post your work for feedback, please sign up for our Member’s Area.
Now then, Set your timer before reading further (10 minutes for this one), and have your paper or keyboard ready. For this prompt, you’ll write down some “facts” for the story, and only after you’ve written down these facts should you go on and read the prompt itself...
Now, the “facts” of your story:
Imagine, for a moment, that you live in a mystical, magical land very different from our own. It can be either a science fiction place with starships and a version of Microsoft Word that doesn't crash, or it could be a fantasy place out of Harry Potter where enchanted quills write stories of their own using lambskin parchment and black dye from Endless Ink, Inc. Or, if you like, it could be a world very much like our own, except with one subtle change (think The Simpsons: there's a scene where the weather is terrible, it rains every day, but each raindrop is a sweet sugary donut).
Write down the name of this world, and the one key difference between this world and our own.
That done, imagine for yourself a kind of "hero" for this world. It can be an ordinary person with a special determination to "do right" by combating the scourge of donuts that have devoured the local weather, or it can be a superhero with some special power such as the ability to impose Linux stability on Microsoft systems with a wave of the hand.
Write the name of this character and the one "special power" or "special determination" which makes this individual a hero.
And now, The Prompt:
Your hero is getting married tomorrow. It will be a very traditional wedding. And the in-laws have brought a loaf of their famous fruitcake as a gift to the bride-and-groom-to-be. But there's a catch: your hero is very, very, allergic to fruitcake. And they've already set a healthy slice on our plucky hero's salad plate. All eyes, now, are on the hero to pronounce this fruitcake delicious or...
(now write as fast as you can for ten minutes)
Happy Writing!
Ryan
Be sure to sign up for our Member’s Area so you can post your story for comments – all freewriting feedback will be positive and reassuring.
If you have received this e-mail in error or would prefer not to receive such e-mails in the future, please reply back with REMOVE in the subject line.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Trying Something New
Yesterday, I wrote a new story. It had no guns, no light-saber-wielding hobbits, not even a time traveler. It started with a girl in a coffee shop and went on from there. I've never written about an ordinary person in an ordinary world sitting in a coffee shop - I didn't know what to expect. But then, who is ever truly ordinary? Can any human being be considered reliably normal?
The impetus for this story came from my MFA thesis advisor. I met her for the first time yesterday during our department orientation. As we all sat around the table - eight fiction writers, two of them faculty - we talked about what it meant to be in an MFA program. And my thesis advisor recommended that as we work through the next two years, we should each try to generate new work. We should be experimenting with new ideas, developing stories which may not succeed. As she said, a spectacular failure is better than always turning in "perfect" work.
Last night, I started with a girl in a coffee shop. Then her parents appeared. Then friends of hers outside. Someone had a prosthetic arm, others were playing Scrabble. I didn't know where any of it was going, but there were no laser cannons. No solar flares, no end of the world, no entropic heat death of the universe. I left out the standard plot drivers of speculative fiction (which I'm good at) and went with writing about the kind of people you might find on the street (which I'm not so good at).
Honestly, I was surprised. I ended up writing a story about an anorexic who is oppressed by her well-intentioned parents. Did I know I would write about this? Nope. Never would have predicted it. If I had predicted it, the story would have fallen flat. It would have been a diatribe about college and repression and the injustice of living. Maybe it still is. But I didn't know I was writing about those things until they happened. I didn't try fitting the story to any of the molds I'm accustomed to, and yet I ended up touching on themes that I've always wanted to write about. It even has a modicum of racial tension, something I've never had the courage to write about directly.
So is it good? I think so. The story works. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The characted changes, somewhat, over time. We have conflict. It takes on a side of life I understand strangely well, but haven't really written about, this drive to see students perform academically at all costs. More importantly, though, the story is unique. It pushes my writing into uncharted territory. I've proven to myself that I can craft a plot without resorting to the deux ex machina of overwhelming speculation.
This, I think, is critical for good writing. The reason that many stories in speculative genres like fantasy and science fiction fall apart is the lack of character-driven plot. A story is nothing without character - as human beings, we want to read the stories of other human beings. We want to understand our fellow travelers on this blue Earth. But when that Earth is about to be devoured by hungry nanomachines from Andromeda, we all know what the protagonist will (must!) do - save the Earth. And many speculative writers, unfortunately, fail to create characters who are nuanced enough to save the Earth in a "human" manner. We humans never simply solve a problem - we try to make the problem work for us. We try to make our lives fulfilling and secure. But when that asteroid is coming in and the atmosphere is boiling away, it's easy to ignore this. Sure, astronaut dude is saving the planet, but what about his wife and his kids and his parents and that roommate he had in college who still hates him for making the astronaut corps? The Earth's about to be crushed, man. We don't have no time to think about no hateful roommates.
This is why I'm so happy with my story from last night. I want to write science fiction - good science fiction. Character-driven science fiction. But in writing stories with themes from out-there, you have to first learn how to write the people down here. And I don't mean write about them - I mean write them into your stories, write them as people, write their lives as if they could happen. And as we strip away the trappings of speculation, as we get down to the bare bones of what makes these protagonists as real as people, we discover the personal plots that make our lives and our stories truly come alive.
The impetus for this story came from my MFA thesis advisor. I met her for the first time yesterday during our department orientation. As we all sat around the table - eight fiction writers, two of them faculty - we talked about what it meant to be in an MFA program. And my thesis advisor recommended that as we work through the next two years, we should each try to generate new work. We should be experimenting with new ideas, developing stories which may not succeed. As she said, a spectacular failure is better than always turning in "perfect" work.
Last night, I started with a girl in a coffee shop. Then her parents appeared. Then friends of hers outside. Someone had a prosthetic arm, others were playing Scrabble. I didn't know where any of it was going, but there were no laser cannons. No solar flares, no end of the world, no entropic heat death of the universe. I left out the standard plot drivers of speculative fiction (which I'm good at) and went with writing about the kind of people you might find on the street (which I'm not so good at).
Honestly, I was surprised. I ended up writing a story about an anorexic who is oppressed by her well-intentioned parents. Did I know I would write about this? Nope. Never would have predicted it. If I had predicted it, the story would have fallen flat. It would have been a diatribe about college and repression and the injustice of living. Maybe it still is. But I didn't know I was writing about those things until they happened. I didn't try fitting the story to any of the molds I'm accustomed to, and yet I ended up touching on themes that I've always wanted to write about. It even has a modicum of racial tension, something I've never had the courage to write about directly.
So is it good? I think so. The story works. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The characted changes, somewhat, over time. We have conflict. It takes on a side of life I understand strangely well, but haven't really written about, this drive to see students perform academically at all costs. More importantly, though, the story is unique. It pushes my writing into uncharted territory. I've proven to myself that I can craft a plot without resorting to the deux ex machina of overwhelming speculation.
This, I think, is critical for good writing. The reason that many stories in speculative genres like fantasy and science fiction fall apart is the lack of character-driven plot. A story is nothing without character - as human beings, we want to read the stories of other human beings. We want to understand our fellow travelers on this blue Earth. But when that Earth is about to be devoured by hungry nanomachines from Andromeda, we all know what the protagonist will (must!) do - save the Earth. And many speculative writers, unfortunately, fail to create characters who are nuanced enough to save the Earth in a "human" manner. We humans never simply solve a problem - we try to make the problem work for us. We try to make our lives fulfilling and secure. But when that asteroid is coming in and the atmosphere is boiling away, it's easy to ignore this. Sure, astronaut dude is saving the planet, but what about his wife and his kids and his parents and that roommate he had in college who still hates him for making the astronaut corps? The Earth's about to be crushed, man. We don't have no time to think about no hateful roommates.
This is why I'm so happy with my story from last night. I want to write science fiction - good science fiction. Character-driven science fiction. But in writing stories with themes from out-there, you have to first learn how to write the people down here. And I don't mean write about them - I mean write them into your stories, write them as people, write their lives as if they could happen. And as we strip away the trappings of speculation, as we get down to the bare bones of what makes these protagonists as real as people, we discover the personal plots that make our lives and our stories truly come alive.
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