Advice to my past self...

I was looking over my archives the other day, just sort of skimming through notes and revisions and scribbles and if I were to give my past self a few pieces of advice, they would be:

1) Just keep writing, 2) don't throw anything away and 3) put the date on everything.

They both seem rather simple and sort of "duh", but really, I wouldn't have known back then just how much I wish I'd done those things then.

1) Just keep writing. Even if an idea isn't working or you don't know how it should turn out, just keep writing it. It's sort of the golden rule of NaNoWriMo especially, but it can be applied to just about any other piece of writing. If nothing else, you'll figure out what doesn't work. In the best cases, you can end up with character motivations you didn't see coming or a plot twist that incorporates a throw-away mention you made earlier. In the worst cases, you simply have to throw out some stuff that wasn't working anyway when you edit.

However you won't really throw them away because

2) You shouldn't throw anything away. Even if that one chapter is just awful, the idea makes no sense or it's a conversation from the more bland regions of Blahsville, keep it anyway. If nothing else, you can look back on it and laugh at yourself. In the best cases, you might reincorporate it somewhere in another story or it provides the perfect inspiration for something else. In the worst cases, you at least have material for your future biographers and literary scholars to look back on and write books about.

And to help them out, you should

3) Really, put the date on EVERYTHING. All-caps was warranted there, because you have no idea how many times I've looked back at stuff I know I wrote more than a few years ago and have wondered exactly when I started writing it. Or I find a scribbled sentence or idea and I have no idea when I came up with it. If nothing else, you'll have a timeline of papers. In the best cases, you can track how long you've been on a project and keep track of your consistency and inspiration timeline. In the worst cases... Well, there really are no worst cases here. You just had to take the split second it took to write the date up in the corner. And I really do mean everything. Even if it's just a post-it note you happened to scrawl "two months instead of three?" as a note to yourself for your novel, date it. It makes things so much easier in the future, in ways you wouldn't even imagine now.

Well, unfortunately, I can't tell my past self this, but maybe my future self can put it all to good use.

Sweet lullaby...

There are times when you run into a book or a movie or a piece of music that is just too powerful. It literally pains you to read/watch/listen to it because it is just too beautiful.

Going through a music phase right now, similar to that of pre-NaNo frenzy, and just aching at the gloriousness that is Joe Hisaishi.

One of my favorites from the first Studio Ghibli movie I ever saw: Howl's Moving Castle (whole rant about that here). Seriously though, the entire soundtrack is pretty much win.

Been listening to a lot of foreign music (and a lot of foreign film/anime soundtracks) lately, mainly because even when they have lyrics, I don't understand the words and thus aren't too distracted. Typically, if I listen to a song with lyrics that I know, I inevitably end up singing (for real, it actually requires concentration for me not to sing along to any and every song I know) and if I sing, I end up typing or writing what I am singing rather than what I actually mean to be writing.

'Inasmuch' still won't leave me alone until I scribble down some notes, but the good news is that I can sleep in tomorrow, so it can keep me up all it wants. I have pretty music to listen to, so I don't mind.

Why...

...does inspiration have to strike in the middle of the night when you have to get up crazy early the next morning?

For real, I have to get up at five tomorrow for work and 'Inasmuch' just won't leave me alone.

Beneath the mask...

In fiction, it seems like if you are a) a nice person, you can hide all sorts of mental issues, but if you are b) mean in an attempt to mask your mental issues, everyone can see right through you with their psychiatrist-vision.

For examples of this phenomenon, I present to you a) Tohru from Fruits Basket and b) the titular character from House.

a) Fruits Basket 

There's this trope called the Stepford Smiler where a character seems cheerful and all, but is really masking a deep-seated pain or crazy or whatever. The thing is, no one ever seems to see through it except the audience. The rest of the characters remain painfully oblivious until something happens that causes the mask to break. 

Exhibit A: Torhu Honda 

Just look at those big eyes and bright smile. So cute! She's kind, caring, unrelentingly cheerful...

But then she's so accommodating that she's practically a doormat, has deep-seated self-esteem issues (as does everyone in the show) and just generally has quite a few sucky moments in her past. Yet, the other characters would never have known if there weren't moments where she breaks down and says something she doesn't mean to. No one; not her friends, not her adoptive family, not even her real family. The audience sees it more than the other characters do, because we see her at her most vulnerable. 

Contrast this to:

b) House M.D.

Exhibit B: Dr. Gregory House

Bitter, sarcastic, drug-riddled... He's a bit of a mess.

And everyone seems to know why. Patients he's only just met are monologuing at him, telling him all the reasons for why he acts the way he acts. Sure, sometimes he himself tells us about his past, but it's because people have been poking at him, prodding at him, explaining to him (and via him, the audience) why he acts the way he acts and how beneath his jerkish exterior there is a heart of gold.  

I picked these two examples because they are particularly egregious. As mentioned, House's patients almost always seem to know exactly what his game is after just meeting him, and Tohru goes for a long, long time without anyone noticing that she was, oh, living in a tent, abused by her family, blah blah blah. In fact, she has to tell them mostly or have people see it for themselves. And the reverse is true in both examples as well: in early seasons of House M.D., no one seems to see how messed up Cameron is and all through Fruits Basket characters are explaining other character's issues to each other in response to bursts of temper. 

And it always seems to be this way. If a character is a jerk, another character almost always has to insist that there is actually some sort of good in him and it will almost always turn out that there is. But if someone is indefatigably happy, it could be anything really hiding under the smile. 

It's like characters (and I guess people in real life too) would like to think that when something seems all right, it is, but if something seems to be wrong, we have to pick at it until we find an answer.

Any other examples you guys can think of for either extreme? Or, conversely, any examples that completely defy these generalizations?

Laughing at myself...

Funny that right after I should write an entire blog entry about how I seem to be unable to write anything but angst, I sit down with a fresh notebook and wrote two entire pages of a non-angsty beginning to a second draft.

Yes, I'm starting afresh. Probably something like over six thousand words on my last draft and I'm sort of ditching them and beginning again.

Do I consider those words a waste? Do I consider that time and the act of throwing it all away to be completely pointless?

Nope.

This is how I write.

It's a messy mess of a mess. Full of false starts and redundant redundancy. Those thousands of words I wrote showed me what didn't work and gave me ideas for things that would work. And now I have a quirky beginning, the sort of light-hearted prose I was whining about not being able to write.

The moral: I shouldn't whine about how I can't do something until I try.

Not-so-happily ever after...

See, here's the thing: I write angst.

I don't want to. It's not like I mean to. But it seems like, because I take my characters so seriously, they start to take themselves too seriously and I end up with these serious stories, filled with psychological issues and just general not-fun.

It just sort of happens, even when I mean to write something a little more lighthearted. I mean, for NaNo10 even, I wrote a zombie story. How can you take a zombie story too seriously? The entire point of a zombie story is to have fun with it or scare the crap out of people. It's a survivor story and because there is no society, you have no rules and so you can go on a rampage of awesome.

But I had to bring character angst into it and it became one of my darker things to date, I think, simply because of the protagonists' lack of morals. It has a relatively happy ending, but still...

Then comes my hedgehog story. I meant for it to be light-hearted, sort of like Princess Tutu, which manages to make me smile every single episode, even when it descends into the dark and heart-wrenching. There is something just so heartwarming about it and funny and cute and just plain sweet, that manages to make the darker moments all the more dark. The ending is happy, if a little bittersweet, but it manages to still feel light and cheerful despite it all.

However, my projected ending for the hedgehog story (at least as it stands) is not really happy. If anything, it's bittersweet, with emphasis on the "bitter". There is a potential for a happy ending later, but the actual last event shown on the page would be heartbreaking (y'know, if I actually succeed in the correct mood in my writing).

The problem is that I can't think of a way to make a happy ending feel like a cop-out. After all I'm going to put my characters through and the world I have established, the happy ending I want wouldn't fit. It would feel like a deus ex machina, or just simply a saccharine ending. It would feel like I was forcing a happy ending on it.

It drives me crazy when stories do this, putting us through so much and then at the last minute pulling the ridiculously happy ending. And while it feels good the first time you experience it, the second time it doesn't feel quite the same. It can feel like a let-down, sort of negating all the suffering that came before it. I'd rather have it end with hope; maybe everything isn't perfect, but there is a knowledge that the future will improve and be happy.

That's sort of what I'm shooting for with my hedgehog story, but at the same time, it just sort of makes me super-aware of how angsty my stories seem to be all the time.

Quite angsty.

Nostalgia and crack...

So, in being all nostalgic and stuff on my birthday today, I was reading over my old writing, namely from around 2006, and was impressed with the thoroughness of some of it. And shocked that my memory was so bad.

It turns out the bulk of the writing for my old project Ocean of Fire was done when I was fourteen through maybe early sixteen, which is older than I had thought. But reading over the notes and things almost made me want to pick it up again. I wrote a ton of stuff back then, like folders and folders of outlines and notes. I had forgotten just how much it was, even if I do remember having the entire twenty-page original outline up on my wall for a long time.

That led me to thinking about one of my other more-favorite characters from that abandoned project, Meirzen, and how I occasionally feel the urge to resurrect his story the way I did Quina and Red's. And I then had the cracktastic idea to combine his universe with that of my hedgehog story. I don't know if it's actually going to happen, or if it does, I'll just be stealing the world and there will likely be no mention of Meirzen himself (seeing as how if there were, he would end up dying and I don't want to kill him off in case I ever do decide to resurrect his story) but I was just shocked at the audacity of my brain for even thinking of such a thing.

There needs to be a term for original fiction writers and ideas for crossovers and such like that within our own writings. Fanfiction writers have the term crack!fic, where they have the strangest crossovers or ships or simple out-of-characterness, but we original fiction writers don't really get that, seeing as how it's all in our head or in our private universe. No one outside of us cares because no one outside of us has ever seen it. But we do crossovers and cameos all the time. I once wrote something like four pages that contained every main character I'd ever written, all in some sort of secret agent group hunting down their respective antagonists or something like that.

Seriously, we need our own term. Suggestions?