A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Friday, June 29, 2012

I've got a theory, it could be characters

When I consider what I'm able to do as a writer, in those times when I'm honest with myself, I realize that there is actually a very good reason why I tend towards science fiction: my grasp of people is...limited at best. Not to say that sci-fi can't be character-based. It's just that, when I compare a sci-fi novel like Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein to some piece of realistic fiction like, say, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, I can't help but feel that science fiction is heavier on the big ideas and the plot rather than character motivation/interaction.

This is very much the case for me. I can think of ideas for how a story's plot should go fairly easily, but when it comes down to it, I feel like I ruin them every time by using characters that are perhaps less alive in my head than the plot that they are forced through is.

I've only ever "finished" one WriMo, in the sense that I got all the way through the plot I planned: my first JulNoWriMo in 2009. In retrospect, though, it is also one of the worst offenders among my WriMos for containing characters who fall flat, who feel more like archetypes than fully-fleshed characters. It had all the stereotypes: the superficial bitch who cares more about appearances than reality; the conformist who tries too hard to fit in with societal norms and only destroys herself and her self-esteem by doing so; the odd one out who is too quiet and crushed by the Establishment to leave her role as a cog in the machine; the manipulative scientist who goes beyond the boundaries of sanity and humanity to advance society. Etc., ad nauseum, and so forth.

And now it's time for a...

PRETENTIOUSNESS WARNING: The following contains pseudo-intellectual musings that may tip the bullshit scale.

There is an obvious reason why they are stereotypes: they speak to ideas and truths that appeal to people at their cores. The fact that they speak to us at such a fundamental level does mean something, and I don't think it's inherently bad for characters to fall into these categories, as long as they are fleshed out in a more realistic way as people. I think my problem has been that when I write for WriMos, the characters end up just going through the motions of my plot in order to fill a particular role, rather than encountering situations as people and reacting to them.

(As a side note, I typed out "going through the motions" and started singing a particular song from the Buffy musical episode. What can I say? I'm a proud dork!)

I'm trying harder this year to remedy this failing. The general plot points I blabbed about went through in the last post are just that: general. I want the events to be motivated by what Sarah and Wesley are thinking and feeling instead of occurring to fulfill some Grand Plan of mine.

Oh, and a last thought before I sign off: I hate when my cast bores the hell out of me. For two or three of my WriMos, I have tried to write about normal people. Problem is, normal is dull as dirt, both to read and write about. I like weird, quirky people in real life; hopefully I can do justice to a cast of weird, quirky people in the written word. :)

Thursday, June 28, 2012

June Last-Minute Post: The Beginnings of an Idea

As June starts to wind down, there comes a time when I need to sit down and think about what I am writing for July. I know, I know, I've posted the general synopsis of what I'm doing everywhere so that I can stay motivated to write that piece. Still, I think it would probably help to sit down and just blather on the Internet about things that have been brewing in my head for, well, who knows how long.

BLATHER WARNING: TL;DR AHOY!

I suppose I should dedicate this post to talking about the seed in my mind that this idea sprouted from. I actually first thought of the idea around the middle of JulNoWriMo last year, when I was in the midst of writing my satirical noir detective novel about Humphy Bogart, the alcoholic, chain-smoking teddy bear. I was enamored enough with what I was writing at the time, though, that I kind of shoved the new idea onto the back burner. I tried to write a rough sketch of the idea in November for NaNoWriMo, but with the addition of actually hard homework sets and the start of college and actually being social for a change, I really couldn't find the time.

Now that I've sufficiently teased the idea, I suppose I should actually tell you what the idea was, huh? To preface this entire discussion (and hopefully make me seem less like a talentless, borrowing hack), please bear in mind that I am...inspired a lot by what I read and watch. I suppose the best way to describe it is that the art I experience in my daily life is a major force that drives me to try and make art. (Not claiming that what I write is art; far from it. I can only hope that one day, I will actually be capable of creating something that makes the world more beautiful, whether that be through chemistry or writing.)

Anyway, I was rambling pretentiously more than I usually do back there. Let's get back on track.

So originally, the idea for my current JulNo began as something a bit similar to (at least, what I know of) a Doctor Who-style relationship in which two people are "out-of-sync" with one another due to time travel and each encounter between them occurs at different times in each individual's time stream. After reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, I realized that I also wanted to write an epic romance, so the original concept turned into an epic romance across time in which the two participants are at different stages in their relationship to one another every time they interact.

General concept: check.

General plot outline: still fairly simple to devise. (SPOILERS AHOY!) A teenage girl, passionless and disconnected from the world, is sent by her overbearing mother to live with her father all the way across the United States for the summer. She is also forced by her mother to take part in a residential science camp of sorts that starts a few days after she arrives in California, in which she stays in dormitories during the weekdays and lives at home on weekends. During those few days before camp starts, she wanders the neighborhood surrounding her father's house and comes across a wooded park with a small creek running through it. (This next part was actually extremely vivid in my conception of the story!) She finds a bridge crossing the stream and, walking onto it, sits down, her legs dangling over the edge, feet a couple feet (lol) above the surface of the water. She kicks aimlessly a few times before her foot comes into contact with something solid...and completely bowls over a guy who was skulking under the bridge, knocking him into the water.

And so, girl meets boy...but boy already recognizes girl for some reason. He thoroughly perplexes her, bringing up strange, fairly nerdy topics for conversation (including the titular relativity), before leaving abruptly. She finds this occurrence strange but mostly forgets about it in the rush to get to camp...until she sees the boy at camp. Recognizing him, she walks up to him and jokingly references her last encounter with him.

...except he doesn't remember it at all. This is the first time he has ever met her, and (from his point of view) he's thoroughly justified in his confusion. She is, justifiably, a little miffed and she reminds him of their conversation, perhaps making a crack about a concussion. He doesn't really recognize any of it, though his ears perk up a little at her mention of their discussion of relativity. He seems lost in thought for a time before abruptly telling her that he has to leave and hurrying away, for he has just had an epiphany about something that will eventually lead to his building of the time machine.

From there, we spend some time with the girl getting to know her absent father and some other people at camp, though remaining relatively disconnected still from all of it, while the guy continues to act strangely aloof. Then, suddenly, one day he approaches her out of the blue, eagerly suggesting that they go on an adventure!

And what happens next is so brilliant! The [spoiler] ends up [spoiler], which leaves [spoiler] terribly [spoiler], and [spoiler] is the only [spoiler] that can possibly [spoiler].

I know, I know. I'm a jerk. xD It's been really helpful to just vent about what happens in what essentially boils down to Act I of my novel. I'm feeling more pumped already about JulNoWriMo!

Next post, I may talk either about music and what big ideas are motivating my JulNo this summer or I may talk a bit about my characters. We'll see what I feel like writing about when the time comes.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Summertime and Planning

Finals are over! (Thank goodness.)

I'll be sticking around school for a few more days probably, and then I'll head home on an Amtrak train. I now have some more freedom to think about my novel.

Life is good. :)

Sunday, June 3, 2012

On the End of Freshman Year and JulNoWriMo

It probably feels like a year since I last posted...because it's been about a year since I last posted. Jeez. I am not good with keeping up with blogs, am I?

Well, it's now the last week of class of my freshman year, and finals are coming right around the corner. It's kind of terrifying...and, all at once, sad. I've loved college so much more than high school. In high school, being someone who loved to read and to learn and to do all these nerdy things...it wasn't something that was celebrated. And yet in coming here to college, everyone is a nerd. Everyone is smart. It is socially acceptable--perhaps even celebrated!--to be the nerdiest you can be. I love it so, so much, and it's almost sad to be going home for the summer. A lot of my friends have internships here, but me, I'm going home to JulNoWriMo and self-studying.

On the self-studying first: I'm planning on doing a "48-unit course load" on my own, which essentially means five classes. One of those "classes" will be set aside any pleasure reading I want to do over the summer and for JulNoWriMo, as well as just generally being around friends and family back home (and maybe some goofing off). That will comprise nine units. The rest will be composed of reviewing Ch41a, which is organic chemistry (9 units), reviewing Ch102, which is inorganic chemistry (9 units), learning Ph2a/Ph12b, which is quantum mechanics (9-ish units), and learning ACM95a, which is complex analysis (12 units). I'm super excited; I've got an entire schedule worked out and everything!

As for JulNoWriMo, I'm basically writing something fairly similar to an idea I came up with for NaNoWriMo 2011, except I'm integrating more of my feelings about living in an environment that's super accepting of nerd-dom into my novel, tentatively titled "It's all Relative". (Ha-ha, a relativity joke; see what I did thar?) Allow me to paste my novel description from the JulNo website:
Sarah Jones is hopelessly addicted to two things in life: running and online gaming. After she quits the cross-country team, her mother decides she needs more direction in life--not to mention more things to pad her resume for college with!--and ships her off to live with her absent father in sunny SoCal for the summer, where she is signed up to take part in a summer science camp. Furious at being forced to do something so outside of her interests and inclinations, Sarah is determined to hate everything about the summer. Things quickly get out of hand, however, when she meets a boy at camp who has succeeded at the impossible: building a time machine. Suddenly, the prospect of a summer with an infinite amount of time at her fingertips doesn't seem quite so bad.
This novel honestly comes closest to me "writing what I know" out of every WriMo I've done, which is a little funny, as I am probably the least knowledgeable person in terms of writing convincing romance stories. It's also a little worrisome, as I don't want to fall into the trap of writing a Mary Sue. I've honestly thought a lot less about characters this year than I've thought about plot, so we'll see how it goes.

Maybe once I've thought about the characters a bit more, I'll share some insights into Sarah and Wesley. For now, though, I think I'll leave this blog entry here, so that my blog is a little less empty and dead.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Quotes Index

What can I say? I like being organized. Here is a list of all of the quotes I've posted on here, sorted based on the originator of the quote, in alphabetical order.

Bible

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Boris Pasternak

Portal 2

John Banister Tabb

William Wordsworth

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

JulNo Progress and Quotes!

I had a day off from the library today, so I basically spent my time doing a number of small things. I finished up the backlog of reviews that I needed to write for the books I've read, so those are posted. Then I finished up my calculus studying, and I started reviewing for physics. Yep, I'm counting the review books as things I've read, because I have sunk a lot of time into 'em, and they're books. I'll probably fail even more miserably at the 100 book goal if I don't include them, so there. Nyeh nyeh. ;)

Besides some gross personal things that you--the Internet--don't need to hear about, not much else happened today. What can I say? I'm a slobby, lazy person in the summer. I did, however, spend a bunch of time perusing Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and that was a lot of fun. It made me remember how much I love Emerson, namely A LOT. But I also found a bunch of quotes I decided to copy down, and some even for my novel!

Probably you know this already, but it's like a tradition with me to do JulNoWriMo every year, each time with a new novel, since 2009. I'm well-aware that I'm a fairly pretentious person. (I love that I say that with a pretentious statement. Heh. :) So it's no understatement when I say that most of what I've written previously for JulNo's and NaNo's has been fairly shitty and overblown. That is why this summer I decided I wanted to do something entirely different. I want to try to break the mold of what I've done before, you know?

But back to Bartlett. I found a ton of quotes that I liked for my novel, to either be integrated or included in the epigraph at the beginning. And, best of all, I found myself a title! Yeah!

I'm going to be calling my piece The Shadow of the Daisy.  It's after the following Wordsworth quote:

Small service is true service while it lasts:
Of humblest friends, bright creature! scorn not one:

The daisy, by the shadow that it casts,

Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.
--Wordsworth, To a Child: Written in Her Album
What's best about it is that it actually plays fairly well to one of the main aspects of the novel I'm planning. More details on that in a future blog post, I think. But now for more quotes I liked that are related to the novel!

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
--Ralph W. Emerson, Journal: December 20, 1822
He discovereth deep things out of the darkness, and bringeth out to light the shadow of death.
--Job 12:22
A corner draft fluttered the flame
And the white fever of temptation
Upswept its angel wings that cast
A cruciform shadow.
--Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Out of the dusk a shadow,
    Then a spark;
Out of the clouds a silence,
    Then a lark;
Out of the heart a rapture,
    Then a pain;
Out of the dead, cold ashes,
    Life again.
--John Banister Tabb, Evolution
Why, yes, it is a fairly dark piece, why do you ask? Anyway, hope you enjoyed those quotes. If you'll excuse me, I should be getting to bed.

'11 reviews: hot off the presses [2 more]

Note: These are copied out of Word. Any formatting problems are Blogger's fault, not mine.


12. Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens 
I’m going to preface this review by saying that I have never liked Dickens. I think his prose is way too florid, and he spends too much time talking about details no one cares about. Coming from the queen of overwriting and wordiness, that’s saying something. However, I felt jipped about not being assigned to read this book during the school year, and, seeing as it is a great classic, I decided to give Dickens a chance to redeem himself. I joined a group that was reading this for their choice book (which I ultimately regretted because my group sucked, but never mind that). 
Tale of Two Cities is a novel of epic scope. As it follows the fates of all of its characters, it also seems to hold the fate of two whole countries—Britain and France—in the balance. Plus, it’s against the backdrop of the French Revolution, which is one of my favorite historical periods. However, besides the overarching story of history, Tale also follows the fate of a large ensemble cast of characters too large to get into in this review. If there was anything great about this novel, it was the sheer diversity and depth to its characters, which almost compensates for the shitty prose style. 
The two main characters are Charles Darnay and Sidney Carton, the first a Frenchman, the latter an Englishman; both look remarkably alike, and yet they are starkly different people. Still, they share a love for one Lucie Mannette, the daughter of a long-time prisoner in the Bastille. That is the driving force behind most of their actions, which I won’t really get into too much because the plot is fairly well-known to most—and if you don’t know it, you should really read the book, because that is one of the other main attractions to reading it. 
Overall, I’d recommend reading an abridged version if you don’t want to spend a ton of time on this book, because again, the prose style is lurid and gross. It’s the characters (with the exception of Darnay and Lucie, who are as dull as pasteboard) and the plot that make it a worthwhile read. Look out for Madame Defarge; she’s my absolute favorite, and she is definitely the strongest female character in my book. 
(Tee hee, see what I did there?)

13. Where Angels Fear to Tread, E. M. Forster 
I’ve been in love with E.M. Forster since reading Howard’s End. The prose style is brilliant, doing a great job of balancing a healthy amount of detail and description with actually propelling the plot forward. More than that, I love his characters, and I love the social commentary he does on class and love and idealism and just British-ness in general. He ranks up there with Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte as one of my favorite (classics) authors. :) 
The novel is essentially a family drama, revolving around the Herritons: Mrs. Herriton, a sharp-witted woman who channels her intelligence towards making their family as middle-class as possible; Harriet, her spinster daughter, who is obnoxious, shrewish and moralistic; Phillip, her bachelor son, who is best described as a sort of detached, foppish intellectual with a love for Italy; and finally, the widowed Lilia Herriton, Mrs. Herriton’s daughter-in-law and the shame of the family. Lilia is a hopelessly silly and free-spirited woman who does not fit the oppressive Herriton middle-class-ish-ness, which worries the family because her ~scandalous behavior with men could easily reflect on them and Lilia’s daughter. In order to get her out of the way, the family packs Lilia off with one Caroline Abbott, who requires a companion on her trip to Italy. And all is well for the family for a time; from Lilia’s letters back, they even get the impression that she is “improving”. However, suddenly, without warning, the family receives word that Lilia plans to marry an Italian. Chaos ensues as the Herritons scramble to go to Italy and stop that rash, imprudent marriage in its tracks. 
I did love this piece by Forster, as I expected to. It’s not as refined in its style as Howard’s End was, but I think he wrote this earlier, so that is fine in my mind. The one problem with it, of course, is inherent in almost all of Forster’s pieces: it’s annoyingly depressing. When the ending came, I wanted to throw my Kindle at the wall, I was that frustrated with two annoyingly stupid characters. (Luckily, I didn’t, as Kindles are expensive, you know.) 
Ultimately, though, I think that giving the piece such a frustrating ending probably lent it more meaning than if it had had a happy ending. Thus, if you like this kind of thing, with hilariously absurd situations and social commentary on rigidity and class, I highly recommend Where Angels Fear to Tread. It’s a brilliant read.