About Writing: Part 2

Well, I figured it was about time to finish my ran- er, blog about writing.
Where I left off, I was talking about context and culture, continuity and all those nice “see” words. (saying “c” just looks wrong to me.)
    There is really not too much that I want to say, other than this: You must put yourself into your writing.
Yes, I mean long nights scratching your head, trying to make all the frayed (if you weren’t careful, and sometimes even when you were) plot ends come together, and all that wonderful, agonizing, fulfilling stuff.
    But more so I mean putting you into your work. That’s right. you. (Meaning the writer, which, hopefully, will mean YOU you. And yes. I just used caps. But hey. This is a blog, right? Anything goes… but shouldn’t.)
    What I mean is this. You (speaking to the writer, not the reader) can put a quadrillion hours into researching for your book, can wrack your brain for the most intriguing plot twists and can try to be as original as possible-- but all this will fail to make a good book unless you put your heart into it.
    Let me give an example.
    I read (most of) the series “the furies of Calderon” by Jim Butcher (he also wrote the Dresden Files). The first book was great. It was about this kid in a magic world, who, by birth or by design, had no magic himself-- yet he made himself useful, and indeed essential to his world. Books 1-3 were great.
    I got to book four-- and he finally got a little bit of magical power. And I was like, okay, sweet.
But then I got to book five… And well. Things just got monotonous. And I know that all that was rather vague, so let me re-do that a bit.
Jim butcher had an interesting protagonist, good supporting characters, and an interesting setting as well as culture (based roughly on ancient Roman civilization). But after the third book, Jimmy made several big mistakes, and he murdered his own series.
    First of all, everything worked out for the protagonist. He got the girl. He got the family he always wanted. He got the magic ability. He got the kingship, for Pete’s sake. He got the alliance with the ancient enemies (to unite against a bigger, badder enemy). And eventually (it took him waaay too long, but) he got rid of the bigger, badder enemy too.
    I’m sorry, but this is a departure from reality. Since when does life work out so well all the time?
    Granted, small minor (redundancy intended) characters die. The protagonist says he’s sad about all the no-name citizens who were killed by the nigh-indestructible, always adapting and improving, wax-eating, exponentially growing, never-logically-explained Vord creatures (aka the bigger, badder enemy). But we’re viewing the world through the Protagonist (and a small cast of almost-protagonists). And none of them experience acute suffering. (Sounds kinda like Twilight, huh? Okay, sorry, sorry…)
    Why is this important? Why must someone die to make a good book?
    Well, the fact is… They don’t.
    Yeah. I just contradicted myself. Boo-yah!
    Let me explain once more. Death, in all its macabre er… aura, is a thing that (almost) all of us can relate to. It’s something that a reader can connect to emotionally. And there is where Mr. Butcher (was that a coincidence?) made his mistake. He forgot to give his readers characters that they could connect with.
    In the second book in the series, there’s a scene with a girl (who ends up to be the girl) and the protagonist.  The girl (Kitai), who was the only one of her people and culture in a large city of foreigners, felt very alone, very out of place. The Protagonist (Tavi), is a young man without magic in a world centered around the use of magic; and feels very alone and out of place. In the scene, they comfort each other, and realize that the only place they won’t be outcasts is with each other. It was a really touching scene, and yeah. It made me tear up.
    But why? Why was it such a touching scene?
    Because we’ve all felt alone and out of place in our lives. We’ve all felt like outcasts at one point or another. It’s something we can relate to.
    And I have a feeling it was something that Mr. Jimbo related to very strongly as well. That’s what made that scene so poignant.  He put his heart (or at least a little bit of it) into that scene. And I, as the reader, felt that, and connected with that.
    But it’s a little hard to connect with the powerful king of a large country, who orchestrates the destruction of the enemy that is threatening to annihilate all of his world-- with the use of lots and lots of magic.
That’s where Butcher slaughtered is story. He took the humanity out of it, and then it just became words connected in sentences, and paragraphs, and chapters, and then books.
You have no heart? You have no story.
And that is the bottom line.
    Does that mean that you have to write every single line with tears winking out of the corners of your eyelids, revealing your heart’s deepest secrets with poorly-veiled names like Tonica Mocral? (Hey. That has a ring to it, actually.) Of course not!! You don’t lay your heart bare every few minutes in real life, do you? No.
    But in the moment when everything is crushing down upon you, you lose it. When your friend drives a knife in your back, you bawl. When someone whom you love dies, you don’t go frolic in the daisy field.
Life imitates art, they say, but art should also imitate Life.
   

About Writing (Part 1).

I’m not sure I really have a right to write about writing (hardy har har). I mean, I am only 18 years old. But then again, age hardly limits opinions, though it often reduces the truth in them. So! I shall continue with my rambling about writing because I can. And because I really want to write something but I can’t write anything big, because I’m really supposed to be writing about how I feel about three stories I read for writing. Yeeeah. I’m not too thrilled about that. 
    I mean really? I’m not a person who shares their “feelings” about something, let alone on command. That’s like having breakfast with someone, and in the middle of it saying “drop and give me 20 push-ups!”. You could certainly do so (well; I could do at least ten real ones), but to do it just seems completely forced and out of place. Which! Brings me to my first point.
    I cannot speak for anyone else, but I do not think that good stories are the ones which are built and forced to fit around a few key characters, and their lives, surroundings, and events are custom-made to make an emotional journey for the reader. This bugs the sticky tar out of me.
    Let me explain. And let me use an example of Twilight. I know, I know, many maaaaany people love twilight, and I certainly understand why-- it gives people a doorway into a perfect life that is quite exciting to think of belonging to. But anywho. 
 Okay. Take Twilight. You have a girl who moves to a kind of foreign city (she hasn’t lived there in years) to live with her kind of foreign father. She’s previously from Arizona. Sounds pretty good, right?
But where are all her friends from Arizona?
You’d think that with the way all the popular kids in Forks flock around the  flouncing fair foreigner, she’d have felt the feelings of forlornness from fleeing from her former fields of friends. (Yeah. I need a life.)
But nay! You soon find out that she prefers books to the pesky punks who try to pander to her preferences in the persnickety place called high school. (On second thought, I do have a life.)
    Never once are any friends called or involved from her old abode in ardent Arizona. (Okay, “ardent” is pushing it a bit.) And as the story unfolds, it gets better! She finds out that a uniquely attractive man (vampire) who is a mind reader, is uniquely attracted to her, an unreadable enigma with vampire crack for blood.
    I could go into the dozens of examples in which the story of Bella (which just happens to mean beautiful, even though Bella herself thinks she’s rather plain, even though everyone else unfailingly tells her she’s gorgeous) is shown to be just that: the story of Bella.
    Now, perhaps I’m being a bit unfair. Meyers does throw in some history about the vampires, and werewolves, and all that jazz (which I did find interesting and probably the best part of the series; yes, I’ve read all four books. In 3 weeks. Okay, I guess I don’t have a life). But all the Volturi’s rules and history comes to naught when it comes to Bella and renesmee (*shudder*). No one (important to Bella’s complete and total happiness) dies in the entire series, when by all logicality  they all should have died.  Now, I’m not saying that Meyers should have done a Shakespeare (or in this day and age, a “Rowling”) or anything of the sort, but really? Telling someone you’re going to kill them and then not following through is suspenseful only so many times.
    I didn’t mean to turn this into a Twilight rant. I really didn’t. But it’s such a perfect example of so many literary failings, like continuity, context, and being true to characters’ attributes. But anyhow, I’m moving on.
    Worlds/surroundings/settings tailor-made to a certain individual is not the mark of a genius, but in my opinion is the mark of laziness. There’s a reason why Tolkien spent a lifetime working on Middle Earth (though it would be more accurate to say Ëa); it’s because he never was just telling the story of Frodo and Aragorn, or of little Bilbo Baggins. He was telling the story of a world.  (He never finished telling the story, either; though really, you can never tell the whole story of a world.)
    I am a complete, unashamed, ridiculously ardent (it works well there!) fan of Tolkien. I was watching videos of fans meeting Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez today (it’s better not to ask why), and I found  myself thinking, “Wow, the way these people are acting is ridiculous. They’re crying, screaming, and acting like idiots just because they met another human being who just happens to be famous.” Well…. I’m a bit of a hypocrite, because I just realized that if I met J.R.R. Tolkien in the flesh (it’d be a bit hard to do right now), I would definitely burst into tears, or something equally ridiculous.
    Why? Because he and I are kindred spirits (that’s what I tell myself to help me sleep at night).  But no, really, it seems like almost every quote of his I run into resonates with me. Except the one about pipes and smoking jackets. that one’s a little out of my er, league.
    You see, Tolkien didn’t just make stories. He made cultures. He made languages, civilizations, histories, futures, and everything connected to those things. And that just makes me (g)eek out.
    Just like Frank Herbert. And George Lucas (though he got other people to pitch in on his world making). I think that’s why I have such a high respect for the great fantasy writers: because they don’t just create stories, they create tapestries, and pick a few bright threads to contrast and stand out from the rest.
    Well. I’ve now procrastinated a lot for my writing assignment. I supposed it’s time to start writing about how I really feel. :P But I’ll definitely finish this. Even if it kills me. Now… If Twilight fan girls come and hunt me down for saying such dreadful, honest things… well. I want orange roses at my funeral.