Your Monday Prompt #22
Write a story in which two characters who don’t get along have to work together to come up with a mutually-acceptable solution. Use a third-person omniscient narrator to tell the tale in order to show both characters’ perspectives as the story progresses; this will allow you to depict both action and each character’s reflection on their relationship. Perhaps two mortal enemies must defuse a bomb before they both explode. Maybe a feuding mother and daughter need to rally for their husband/father’s surgery. Or it could be two high school friends who had a big fight want to reconcile before graduation.
Give this exercise fifteen minutes of your time, though if you’re truly getting into your characters it may take you longer to really get the story going.
Write it up and see what happens,
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Technorati Tags: writing prompt, writing exercise, third-person omniscient, surprise yourself
Improvising Lyrics
Julie Strietelmeier is running a brilliant contest at her ukulele-centric blog, UkuleleReview.com, and this weekend I threw my hat in the ring to win a prize package including the ultra-sweet, ultra-cute Flea ukulele.
In the summer of 2005, I was at La Vonne Music in Savage, MN with my friend, Eric, and I plucked around on a Flea. Eric said maybe the Flea is the instrument for me; I didn’t buy one that day, but I did ask my parents for a ukulele for Christmas, almost as a joke. They gave me a basic uke, I strummed out a few tunes, and now it’s the center of my solo musical improv show, The Uncle Ukulele Show. The Flea has a unique shape and feel, and I must say it has a beautiful sound. Saving money for the wedding precludes my picking one up on my own, for now, so I’m hoping my contest entry brings that Flea home to me so I might bring the story full-circle to the Flea.
My entry details some of what I do to set myself up for success when improvising lyrics in The Uncle Ukulele Show. The prep work involved allows me to give my full focued attention to the lyrics themselves, leaving them purely improvised. WordPress didn’t make it easy to figure out how to embed video, but here’s my first crack it on this blog:
Julie announces contest winners on April 4, 2008, so stay tuned to see if I’m one of three winners of my very own Flea… (04.04.08 Update: looks like I didn’t win, but there are plenty of contest entry gems, including the winners.)-nm
Technorati Tags: improv, ukulele, improvising lyrics, Flea ukulele, La Vonne
Your Friday Recommendation #13
Today I recommend a collection of short fiction I picked up at AWP in January. Well, I bought it there and it was shipped to me a month or so later. I’ve been reading excerpts here and there, and have found myself laughing out loud reading Created In Darkness By Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney’s Humor Category.
The length, topics, styles, voices, and senses of humor throughout this collection is the most varietal hodgepodge of ha-ha one could find. You’ll find lists, loads of satire, stylistic parodies, and even some short stories in here. The best part of reading a collection of short pieces is if something isn’t clicking for you, move on to something else. Yet when something works, you’ll relish in it, wanting it to last forever.
Three of my favorite pieces in this collection (and I’m only not-quite-halfway through) includes the opening piece, “A Brief Parody of a Talk Show That Falls Apart about Halfway through” by Tim Carvell, a piece which breaks the fourth wall and then breaks it yet again. Another favorite is “The Newest from Jokeland” by Brodie H. Brockie and R.J. White - featuring terrible jokes all in the sake of self-away irony. Finally, no fan of the Lord of the Rings films can go without reading Jeff Alexander and Tom Bissell’s “Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring DVD (Platinum Series Extended Edition), Part One.” The satire of both Zinn and Chomsky, as well as the brilliant, biting analysis of the film will make fans laugh out loud, guaranteed.
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Technorati Tags: mcsweeney’s, fellowship of the ring, chomsky, tim carvell, r.j. white, jeff alexander, created in darkness, humor, humor category
We have our first winner!
The War of Art Contest, our first contest at Scrawlers.com, is over and we have our winner - Barbara Torris. Her story, Forgotten Magic, was randomly drawn from all contest entires and earned Barbara a free copy of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Congratulations, Barbara! You can read Barbara’s Scrawlers stories here or check out her blog, TorrisTravels.
You can learn more about The War of Art in Your Friday Recommendation #11 from a few weeks back. The contest has inspired me to re-read this inspirational read, and I’m also listening to Pressfield’s fiction novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, on audio tape during my commuting time.
Barry and I are eager to try out more contests at Scrawlers, offering prizes like The War of Art meant to help inspire young writers to find their muse. I know we’d like to see more participation in future contests, because we think it’s a measure of writer use of the website (as well as writer interest). What can you do, dear reader? Let us know what kind of contests would peak your interest enough to enter and of course, keep writing!
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Technorati Tags: war of art, steven pressfield, young writer, writing contest, scrawlers contest
Workshopping a YA short story
I had another short story reviewed in fiction workshop last night and the results were mixed. The story is meant to be the opening tale in a young adult (YA) short story collection narrated by a thirteen-year-old boy about his family, his small Minnesota town, and his observations of the ridiculous world around him. That last bit, the observational nature of the story, held much of the workshop’s focus in terms of what was working or in this case may have issues.
The narrator, Evan, is highly observational - he can really read people and understands where they’re coming from. He’s smart, smarter than a lot of the adults (many teenagers think they’re smarter than the adults they know but in Evan’s case, he actually is), and often lets their bumbling play out all in the name of satire. We discussed how this plays out - does it detract from his simple goals and conflicts? Does it ring true? And of course, who is this story for?
A majority of the conversation revolved around YA as a genre, particularly around the audience and what entices a ten-year-old boy to read a book. I know it’s the kind of book I was looking for at age ten, when I was into novels like To Kill a Mockingbird, Shogun, and work by Nathan Benchley as opposed to sports stories by Will Weaver and Chris Crutcher or full-length books by Jack London (I dug his short stories, like “To Build a Fire” at that age, though). What I was looking for and what young boys today are looking for may not be matching up 100%.
Yet for as many story notes that I received and will take under consideration in subsequent drafts, there are a few I think will get thrown out the window. I think notes I received on the story’s focus and weight will serve me well during revision, but notes I received on Evan’s observational tendencies and ability to read people and whether that rings true really don’t interest me. And they don’t have to -that’s the beauty of workshop. Take what works for you and run with it. Leave the rest, so long as you’re open to its potential.
When it came time for me to ask my peers questions, I only had one - what was funny and worked and what was clearly supposed to be funny and didn’t work? I got feedback on this and appreciated hearing what people had to say. I’m trying as hard as possible to not let anything superfluous to the story at-hand weasel its way into a story just for the sake of the gag, and it looks like I didn’t avoid that trap entirely, this time around. I especially want to look at how crowds are handled for comedic effect. I’m reading The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield these days and am enjoying how Pressfield handles the gallery around the golfers both as a character and as satire.
When it comes to the humor aspect of the story, I fully admit I’m far too concerned with only one aspect of the story, and that’s not setting other aspects of the story up for success. That said, I think many young writers do that to some degree, it just so happens my way of doing this is by focusing on the comedy aspect of the story over everything else. This makes the comedy distracting instead of an augmentation.
I’ll keep writing the stories in this collection, that I know. I have six finished stories (which all need another draft and a polish), one halfway done, and a few down the pipe, mostly in outline / note form. I had thoughts of this being my thesis instead of the screenplay I’m currently working on, but the screenplay has too much potential to sit on a shelf for now.
I doubt I’ll turn in another story told by Evan for this fiction workshop, however, as I don’t want notes to repeat themselves and I want to explore another story in a completely different genre. We turn in our next stories on April 8, and I’m guessing my piece will be workshopped on April 22. I’ll keep you posted, dear reader.
-nm
Technorati Tags: writing workshop, story notes, YA worshop, fiction workshop
Gone, Gary Gygax, Gone
I’m a few weeks late, and there are some great online eulogies out there already (The Simpsons writer Matt Selman’s blogging partner, Lev Grossman, wrote one, as did one of my favorite screenwriters, John August), but I just don’t think I can let the passing of Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, go without comment…
I’m not a Dungeons & Dragons expert. In fact, I’m not really an expert on any particular brand of geek culture; I continually meet people who know more about their area of focus than I could ever hope to know (eh, maybe I’m The Simpsons Guy). I enjoyed Dr. Who as a kid, but Tim Uren is the walking master database. I know the Star Wars films inside and out, but my brother, Jordan, is the person to talk to about the “expanded universe” of books and comics. Want to talk Batman? Talk to Greg Nesbit of local rock band, Freeze-Dried Fun. At any rate, D&D was a part of my experience growing up and it affects who I am today.
My first exposure to D&D was through my uncle Larry. He was a teenager when I was a wee tot of four in 1983 as the first episodes of the animated Dungeons & Dragons episodes hit the air. I watched that cartoon every Saturday, digging on rotating villains, amazing weapons, and Tiamat the dragon. It was violent, epic, and unapologetically unlike any other cartoon I’d ever seen.
On a visit to my grandparents’ home, I found Larry not only had D&D toys, he had a lot of D&D toys. Many of the toys back were big pieces of PVC, sometimes articulated with inner-wired tentacles, though he had several traditional-style action figures, too. I was really into Star Wars and G.I. Joe toys, and my mother couldn’t see investing in yet another toy line (wait, that’s not true - He-Man was in there somewhere, too). 
The only D&D toy I ended up with was still a pretty cool one: Grimsword the Evil Knight.
What I remember most about that visit is that I learned D&D was more than toys and cartoons - it was a game, too. But it was unlike any game I’d ever seen; this game had more paper, pencil drawings, and loads of imagination. Larry had this tri-fold cardboard border that stood up to separate the players’ information with his information as “Dungeon Master,” a terms I was familiar with from the cartoon. He and his friends spoke of characters they created, beings and creatures depicted in numbers and lists as well as the occasional rough pencil sketch. I was already enamored with drawing, so pretty soon I was making up my own characters, too.
Larry and his friends let me play a game with them. I don’t want to go on some sort of smug self-indulgent tale about how at the age of four-nearly five, I could follow the game, write up my character, and even read the monster descriptions (I could, though. Ask my mother.), but that’s what happened. I remember having trouble understanding why certain dice did certain things, but they kept it simple and were all pretty understanding of this tag-a-long kid. I didn’t have much to do with D&D after that for around a decade.
In middle school and high school, I spent a lot of time in Aaron Weet’s basement playing AD&D 2nd Edition (I’m now aware Gygax was shed of royalties by shady TSR dealings through this distinction from his regular, Gygax-controlled D&D, but we didn’t know, and this was what was new at the time) at the end of elementary school, all of middle school, and some early high school. Our group was more into hack-and-slash missions and goofing off while playing, much to Aaron’s chagrin as DM. One mission I remember playing over and over was Of Kings Unknown, a kill-the-orcs, get the gold adventure from Dungeon Magazine #25 where characters gathered a fruit called “moon melons” for some old guy. 
If one ate the moon melons, crazy stuff happened to them, like a change in size, intelligence, armor class due to the growth of natural armor or exoskeleton, or even grow additional eyes. My ultimate grand idea? Find a way to raise an army of a thousand skeleton warriors and go toe-to-toe with a dragon for his hoarde (in fact, this dragon in particular). This eventually lead us to picking up a lot of books by Palladium, too, including Heroes Unlilmited and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. Sidenote: the TMNT role-playing game was especially interesting to own and play at the height of ninja turtlemania. 
All of our friends were obsessed with the Saturday-morning cartoon depiction of the characters, while we who played the role-playing game came to learn of their comic book origins and their original, more adult-oriented adventures.
Between AD&D 2nd Edition, TMNT, HU, Magic: The Gathering, and epic, sweeping board games like Risk and Axis & Allies, gaming was a big part of my life, and the social networks and companionship it developed in us as young men was an important part of my growing up. I learned how to explore my imagination within an established world, expand it to the creation of my own endeavors, and appreciate the nuanced details one can take when creating a storytelling world. As far as I can figure, much of this has to do with Gary Gygax.
Gary had imagination, and he was generous enough to not only share it with the world but also allow people to take his vision and do something new with it. I’m not talking about shady TSR business practices, I’m talking about how he empowered young men everywhere to write up characters, adventures, and have a great time with good friends. I think this has a direct correlation to many of those involved in creative entertainment today; the effects of Gary’s vision are far-reaching.
If you have a D&D story to share, I’d love to hear about it. I’ll give you a +1 pat on the back.
-nm
Technorati Tags: Gary Gygax, Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, D & D, ninja turtles, imagination, heroes unlimited
Your Monday Prompt #21
Write about a character who’s desperate to find something lost or misplaced. Perhaps it’s something physical, like a long-lost CD running over and over in their head and they can’t find it. Maybe it’s something metaphysical, like a solid relationship with a parent. Explore your character’s feelings as the stakes of their search heightens throughout the story. Do they find what they’re looking for? Will they know they’ve found it? That’s up to you.
Give this exercise fifteen minutes of your time. Write it up and see what happens.
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Technorati Tags: writing prompt, writing exercise, surprise yourself
Your Friday Recommendation #12
This is my first film recommendation to you, dear reader, but my copy arrived in the mail on Thursday and the Criterion Collection three-disc reissue of Seven Samurai by writer/director Akira Kurosawa is fresh in my mind. and still spinning in my DVD player.
A poor farming village will be pillaged by bandits when their crops are ready for harvest. They seek out wandering samurai and ronin who will protect them for nothing more than a bowl of rice and regained honor. This sweeping, epic tale explores universal themes like honor, sacrifice, family, identity, and trust with the perfectionist-driven Kurosawa behind it, both as writer and in the director’s chair. Often called his masterpiece, the 1954 film sets many “rules” in combining good filmmaking with good storytelling.
This is the film that inspired the 1970s American film school brats like Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, and especially Lucas. Watch the original Star Wars and the influence will be clear - the way shots are set up to tell story, the character archetypes who mingle in their collective universe, the manner in which a grand story boils down to a handful of strong underlying themes. Seven Samurai is storytelling at it’s best, and we have a lot of strong storytellers because of its existence.
The 207-minute film is presented over two discs, with a third disc containing supplemental material and a booklet featuring essays on the film, including one by star Toshiro Mifune. The set is presented by Criterion, a company known for giving films painstaking detail in the restoration process and loading their discs with worthwhile extras. Basically, Criterion is the Rolls Royce of DVD companies.
This three-disc extravaganza isn’t the first time Criterion has released Seven Samurai. The film was their second release overall, a single disc which I proudly own (yes, I double-dipped on this one), but the picture and sound quality that made that disc so great are blown out of the water by the clarity and amazing quality of the fresh three-disc version. Currently, you can find it on sale at Amazon.com for the low, low price of $27.27. That’s much more than I’ve ever spent on a single film, but it’s also a low price for such a popular Criterion film, and I think it’s a worthwhile price to pay for any young storyteller looking to see a film that not only tells a great story in a powerful way, but has clear influences on modern American filmmaking.
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Technorati Tags: reading recommendation, akira kurosawa, seven samurai, criterion, George Lucas inspiration
My story’s workshop results
Last night saw my story, “Good Taste,” was discussed in my MFA Fiction workshop.
Most comments centered on the information the main character gives the reader (and what he doesn’t give the reader). He’s selective in what details matter to him, while at the same time being really verbose in his speech. My classmates wondered if more pitfalls weren’t apparent than pros in this move. On one hand, the character talks incessantly about the most mundane details, yet speaks virtually nothing about his past. Similarly, the question of an emotional center to the story was up in the air for most readers. Does this character change, and if he does, can we tell?
I included a few innovative moves in the story, at least innovative for my writing. The main character works at a product sampling company and his worksheets are included in the piece. I was also deliberate in style, his manner of speaking lending itself to a three-paragraph structure on each page, the paragraphs falling into lengths of eleven lines, nine lines, and nine lines. These stylistic choices weren’t necessarily commented on, but they were new for me, and it was refreshing to try.
I’m often appreciative of written comments on my manuscripts, too, because I intended this story to be a comedy and it’s typically in the written comments where if something made someone laugh, they let me know. It appears I succeeded quite a bit in that department, so if I can couple stronger craft choices in other areas with the comedy, the story will hopefully come out stronger in its third draft.
Going into a workshop, one should always be open to any and all comments. I’m of the mind that one should take everything in during the moment and then deal with it all afterward to decide what to agree with and what doesn’t work. I was hoping for more comments on what worked, both because I think a lot of what’s on the page does work and because hey, who doesn’t write a story and then want it to work? That said, my peer Katie Lacey may have said it best on the way out of workshop: “I don’t think people go into workshop wanting only all positive comments.”
She’s exactly right. Whether comments questioned my writing choices or lauded them, they’re all going to help the story in one way or the other.
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Technorati Tags: writing workshop, workshop, writing comments
My story gets workshopped tonight.
At the end of January, I wrote a short story entitled “Good Taste” and submitted it for an MFA fiction workshop. Tonight, we’ll take a look at my piece to examine the choices I’ve made, their positives and pitfalls, and I’ll take extensive notes on the entire process. The workshop is small, eleven persons including the instructor, but other pieces have been treated with grace and genuine interest, so here’s hoping mine receives similar treatment.
As for the piece itself, I got the idea from a radio program I heard in January of 2007, then allowed to churn in my brain over a few months. I finally wrote four pages of the story in September, only to not include them in the latest draft that I wrote in January. The pages didn’t fit the direction of the story anymore, though exploring the character (it’s a first-person, past-tense narrative) and the story’s tone in those four pages was immensely helpful in writing the complete story. The fifteen-page manuscript is told by a man who, unaware of his ever-increasingly eccentric behavior, becomes obsessed with his new job working with unreleased consumer products. Okay, so that’s pretty vague, I know, but I’m not ready to let the proverbial cat out of the bag just yet. Let me just say the narrator did his job in surprising me as I wrote, even switching things around when I was sure I knew what would happen next. He made me laugh in all the right places, and I even felt a little sick at the exact moments he wanted me to. Yes, it’s that kind of story.
Tomorrow, I plan to post about the workshop, from the specific details of how it goes down to the kind of notes I received to what I plan to do with the feedback I receive. While the story may not be perfect, and the workshop process may not be either, going into the process with an open mind is what will make my effort feel worthwhile to me. I set out to write a good story, and this third litmus test (the first two being my fiancée and Barry Hess) will help me gauge success.
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Technorati Tags: writing workshop, short story, tone, good taste
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About
Brought together by mutual interest in creative arts and web development, Minnesota duo Barry Hess and Nathan Melcher founded Scrawlers.com in 2006. Scrawlers marries creativity with a web-based outlet for aspiring writers and The Scrawl blog seeks to add fuel your creative fire.
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