Tag: craft

SPREY Log #12 – Hunting for a theme

Posted on August 20, 2021 by Styxcolor

Okay, before we dive back into dry writing craft, I have realized something.

I’m feeling young again. I’m feeling a specific feeling of youth I’m surprised I still remember. Many years ago I was an actual literature nerd, actually interested in reading, literature history and the technical and practical aspects of the craft of writing. Then I got a taste of literature how it was taught at the university I studied at. Not saying all universities are bad. That one probably was. It made me lose all passion and interest in pursuing writing and reading at all within a year. If that was “real” literature I didn’t want to do anything with it. Now I feel this is gone again, finally, after many years and I’m back to where I was.

And just to be clear, I’m not blaming the university, after all no one held a gun to my head and told me I may never read a book again. Everything that happened, I did to myself, in my head. I just needed the wisdom of many years to come to realize it and undo it. I would even go so far to say I dumbed myself down from then on, further manipulating my further endeavors for the worse. How could or should I ever succeed with any writing if deep inside I didn’t want to do anything to do with it?

I consider myself very lucky that I got behind it after all. Now I can deal with everything I must deal with in peace and without self-manipulation. Writing and literature should have always been a part of me, to whatever extent. I think this will improve my art, not distract from it. And just as a general reminder, me and you do not need anyone’s approval to pursue literature and writing and learning about it. The knowledge is out there, not discriminating, it’s there for everyone. And it wants you to learn about it and use it in your own writing as you see fit. And as anyone can publish books today, truly no one can hold you back but you. Apparently you have to be confident but humble. Confident, so that you don’t give up when you don’t get anyone’s approval first, and we’re talking years possibly, but always humble so that you don’t stop listening and working on your craft.

And now back to writing SPREY.

After last blogpost I made myself a list of bullet points what I have to establish in order for the story climax to work. And fascinatingly, I got a complete looking list of what belongs in the first and second act. This is spectacular to me, as writing had been an incredibly difficult cascade of guesswork for me before. The distance to bridge between first and third act seemed to be impossible. Never did it occur to me that not all story parts are equal, independent from each other, just boxes to tick to hit the “right” act structure. Pretty much everything before the climax is dictated by the climax. There is no guesswork. And now I see how this structure is the bones that hold the flesh of the story together. I was just sculpting the flesh before. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a scene where Rich is about to get sacrificed but then is saved by Willard? Isn’t that villain monologue lovely? I can still have ideas like that and see whether I can work with them, but they can never substitute the underlying structure.

But how can it be that I have SPREY current state now with it’s working structure without knowing my theme yet? Shouldn’t the theme sit one level above the climax and govern it? I’m starting to have a suspicion that I was just assuming a new structural model for my works again without fully understanding it yet. But through research I found a new clue. Theme is not message! A theme is asking and describing a difficult to answer problem or question about the human experience, a message is offering an answer to it. By design, the message can only be flawed, as the most interesting problems about being human absolutely have no easy answers and no matter how educated you are, your own perspective will never be a hundred percent and always right. Also, people tend to not like being preached to. Luckily for me, it doesn’t seem to be the job of a writer to solve existential problems and the human nature once and for all. It is my job to unveil that a problem exists and what makes it so hard to solve it in the first place. And that is what theme does. Which questions do I ask and look at about being human through my characters and what’s happening to them? I can absolutely have a clear theme, but it is not me saying something is so and so, it is rather me asking things like “If love always wins, what is about the villain who is also loved and loves? Is his love not good enough?” That is actually hard to answer and I would have to look at multiple cases or facettes of a case within my story. If my climax is the story core and tangible backbone, my theme is the soul. In a way it is ethereal. And yes, you can absolutely ignore it and create something down to earth without dealing with any of this. But I guess the best stories, those that stay in your memory, do ask those difficult questions.

With SPREY my struggle to find one red line might also stem from just throwing a lot of things together that sounded entertaining and interesting by themselves. But this also results in a mashup of themes, leaving us with no clear winner or direction on that front. Let’s take a look at what we got:

1 Love as a terrifying force

If you think about SPREY from an inverse perspective, a whole biker gang gets killed because they didn’t account for selfless sacrifices made out of love. Willard and Rich each get into mortal danger to protect each other, another character dies for people who aren’t even present. That is terrifying from an outside view. Love, that is regarded as a “soft” power actually lures people into death overriding their instinct for self preservation? Love gets people killed who stand in the way of lovers? Well, unfortunately the slashers are pretty bad people themselves, so in this specific case it will be hard to feel sorry for them.

2 The individual versus the group

Maybe I should rather go for the individual vs group angle. A human is a creature that must exist both as an individual and as a member of a group or groups to be happy, but in actuality humans are never happy. We get extreme cases like Rich who is a struggling lone wolf or on the other end of the spectrum the slashers who literally operate like a hive. And then there’s Willard who finds his own balance as someone who wants to be part of a group, any group, but just doesn’t seem to fit.

3 Are humans trying to domesticate themselves into a functioning civilization since the beginning of time

The slashers themselves as a concept ask a very difficult question. We think bounding together to a tribal group was what helped people drive civilization forward. But here a group has formed that actively undoes civilization, rejects rules anyone outside of them made and uses group synergy to harm and kill people. And they build nothing up of their own, they just destroy. Are they a mirror of us when we can’t get over our selfish desires to build a society that works, a failed civilization? This is a tough one.

4 Man vs (human) nature

And what about good and evil and how being amongst some of the most evil people imaginable teaches Willard to be a better balanced human being? As I said, theme is ethereal, doesn’t give easy answers. Ha, wait, maybe this is a good one – the slashers are everything we do not want to have in our modern, civil, urbanized society. They are a form of nature’s revenge. But it is not the environment that comes for us, it is the parts of the human nature that we don’t want to acknowledge or deal with, our own potential for evil. It comes back to haunt us, no matter what we do to shut it out. And Willard is us, he is very cultivated and civilized, first in utter disbelief about facing actual and unapologetic evil, then part of it, then out of it. Rich isn’t that severely affected because he grew up amongst evil already, there is nothing to be disillusioned about.

I will think about that.
See you next blogpost!

SPREY Log #09 – A lucky strike

Posted on August 17, 2021 by Styxcolor

So it’s day one of the time of silent work. Day Ones tend to go well, but then comes the rest of the marathon where you are actually tested.

Seeking for a clue what plagues my writing…and then actually finding it

I started out with a good idea: What I have been doing so far doesn’t seem to work. So why not take the time to look into a book about writing before immediately jumping back into what I have been doing before?

Stephen King taught me nothing trumps sitting down and writing when it comes to learning and doing your writing. Unfortunately I took it literally and bravely ignored any and all materials on writing for a while. This makes you pretty relaxed as you don’t fear on missing out on anything anymore. I intend to keep this relaxed attitude up and expectations for books, workshops and other materials I tackle 0n a low healthy level. But not reading about the craft of writing is not the way when you realize you hit road blocks that cannot be solved with just more writing.
If you build a house and it collapses…and you build it ten times more and it collapses ten times more…maybe you should look up how to actually build a house. You might have become stronger over time in your house building efforts and maybe learned some practical tricks, but you still haven’t built a house. So when you lower yourself to read how to build a house, only then do you have a chance to learn about “invisible” building blocks like actually placing a foundation first before you build on top of it. You cannot observe this from just looking at finished houses made by others, if you don’t know what you are looking for. That’s about the experience I had when reading the first third of Brian McDonald’s “Invisible Ink”. I didn’t do anything wrong per se in my writing. I was just ignoring some “invisible” building blocks you cannot see in the writing of others, if you don’t know they exist.

One disadvantage of being self-taught that can be overcome if you are willing to learn

I was also impressed how McDonalds describes people like me who purely come from the self-taught, practical side of things. He compares us to a sculptor, who can sculpt really well, but somehow the sculptures soon melt and fall apart. This sculptor has never learned about the armature you build first, that looks nothing like the finished sculpture and that holds the final work together later. You cannot observe that from outside if you don’t know it exists. It’s still there. I think that is one of the biggest strengths of McDonalds’s book. He doesn’t just talk about how we people love stories, he keeps telling us little stories and situations like these to make us understand and memorize what he wants us to see and understand. It is incredible. I would actually call that storytelling magic. And I’m incredibly grateful and happy I got to learn about armatures after all. I will look out for them in the future, not only in writing. What else is there, for example in art, that is invisible if you don’t know about it and that disappears under the finished painting, yet defines it and holds it together?

Writing and theme

My big enemy or unknown writing armature is theme. I went through all my writing life without knowing what a theme is until this year I think, but even then I thought I had grasped it but I actually hadn’t. I’m still not sure, but I will reread passages of “Invisible Ink” and maybe look to some other sources if curiosity strikes again. I couldn’t tell whether “sacrifice”, “red”, “mayonnaise” or “not accepting loss only makes it worse” are valid themes and I had a hard time bringing any of this into my work. I know the three act structure. I can write something that looks like something with a three act structure. But without a theme it has no core. I was curious to find out that you don’t just write and build and write until you have enough words and the plot ended. You work out your theme first, then you write anything. And anything you write is written around that theme. Armature and sculpture on top again. I was only writing all the time.

Theme is hard to see and judge. You can see and judge whether a work is kept in a three act structure pretty easily. But you usually can’t openly see the theme. The protagonist does not have to step out of the frame and tell you “not accepting loss only makes it worse” in your face. What if you just read a story about someone who just can’t let go off a past humiliation and just completely destroys his life and that of the people around him pursuing revenge? Or an old couple that recently lost their only child is so desperate that they consider necromancy to bring it back…but the result is worse than living with the original loss they suffered. Both ticks the theme box. And I’m sure any theme can produce countless works that seem vastly different but are built on the same core. And to answer one thing, a single word like “sacrifice” or “red” is not a theme for writing. It doesn’t say anything, does not give you any direction what to build on and around it. That was like when I learned that you don’t just place shadows by guessing or intuition, but that a shadow is actually a consequence of light not being able to access an area. So shadows and their qualities are the consequence of the qualities of the specific light(s) hitting the forms depicted. There is no guessing. I can promise you I was guessing in my writing a lot as well.

And SPREY?

I did try to throw a theme on top of SPREY, but I did it in an adorably backwards fashion. I understood it that it is part of the etiquette to have a theme. I had my plot and everything I wanted to do with it first and then thought, what would sound good as a theme, a message out of this all? I came up with a single word (of course I did), transformation, change. Everyone in the story has to change and for one way or the other either rejects it, runs from it or only reluctantly and under extreme pressure does it. This is not a theme. And it is twofold not a theme because people and things changing is like a natural law. All that lives, changes. Maybe some of the characters or their dynamics are memorable enough on their own so it’s not a total loss, but in the end, it’s a loss. Something like that will not stick. Don’t repeat my mistakes. Learn about theme early.

Guess I’m starting from scratch

I have no idea where things go from here. Of course I want to understand theme and make it the core of my future writing. I’m aware I probably have to throw out anything I have written so far ever, but I’m not even mildly startled by it. It didn’t work, so why should I mourn that loss? Is it a loss? I might also have to cut some things I wanted to bring up in SPREY should they serve no purpose anymore. What I don’t know is how long it will take to grasp theme and apply it correctly. I will write. I might even do some good old fashioned humble writing exercises to practise this before trying to brute force a SPREY theme and subsequent script. My mind is completely blown right now. But you know what, this means there is hope for the future, hope for a functional SPREY comic and other works, better than it could have ever gotten before.

See you next blog post!

Lessons from Crocheting Part 1

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Styxcolor

The past weeks have been pretty chaotic. You can do a lot of things to mitigate pains from times like that, but you cannot and should not avoid breaks and shut-downs altogether. In the end they happen for many reasons and can be pretty healthy as in resulting in healthy corrections of your priorities and way of working.

Surprisingly for myself I took up crocheting in that time. I hadn’t done that since elementary school. There was no reason behind it, just curiosity.

I was surprised how it went from there. I have collected some wisdoms and analogies from this time, that also work for other fields such as art. See for yourself:

  1. Everyone and everything can be a teacher, if you are open for new experiences.
  2. A plain first impression can be deceptive. You might enjoy the new activity anyways.
  3. Action trumps advice.

Some more explanation for point 3: Imagine watching a couple of crocheting videos and after you have decided whether the video is compatible with you or not, then not crocheting along. You might feel a bit smarter, because you have seen some things that are possible, but you actually haven’t crocheted a thing, either working along the tutorial or
trying own things. Your crocheted results will be poor and spending the time consuming the videos will be of no consequence in the end. If you decide to watch tutorials or taking advice…put it into action immediately.
You get experience by experiencing doing things (and all difficulties on the way).

Personal note: if you have a tendency to procrastinate by collecting information/preparing like myself, you might try dropping watching tutorials altogether for a while (mental diet). Sounds radical, but try it. You are only allowed to watch a tutorial when you draw along in real-time AND actually learn to solve a relevant problem for your current piece you absolutely wouldn’t be able to solve at all without help from outside.

Have fun drawing!