Viable Paradise: A Travelogue (Addendum to Part 6)
Whoops, once again I've hurried the narrative along too fast and forgotten vitally important pieces in my rush to get this travelogue posted. After Patrick's lecture, and well before Our Heroine went to lunch with her new tribe-mates, there was a crucially important final one-on-one meeting with an instructor: Cory Doctorow. I would be wildly remiss if I did not mention it here in at least as much obsessive detail as I have everything else.
Way back on Wednesday, I'd gotten up the gumption to ask Cory for an unscheduled meeting (I wish now that I'd asked Steve Gould and Laura Mixon too, but I didn't want to be greedy or presumptuous about their time, so sadly, I did not. On Thursday, in a fit of optimism, I asked Cory if I could have him critique my fledgling new short story rather than the submission piece of the novel. (Even with the motivation of knowing Cory would be reading it, I didn't manage to finish the foul-mouthed pilot story, but I figured it was more up Cory's alley than my fantasy novel chapters.) So Friday before lunch, we went up to Cory's room for a brief meeting that I wish I could have dragged out for hours, it was so helpful (and enjoyable). I found Cory really easy to talk to, and he always brought up interesting thoughts and thereby encouraged me to do the same. He started by asking me why I'd come to VP, how it had been going for me so far, and if I'd gotten what I wanted out of my VP experience. All interesting questions, and a great way to begin the process of reflection that I've been continuing here in this blog for the last 3 weeks.
Then we got into talking more specifically about my foul-mouthed pilot story (which for the record was called "What You Really Need As Much As A Hole In The Head"), and once again it was a great reinforcement for some of the specific writing craft I'd learned (or re-learned) over the last week. Many of issues as a writer, which I am now becoming intimately more familiar with, were reflected here as well: wandering beginnings with too much muddling about finding my way into the character and the story (the "your story doesn't begin until page 10" problem), characters without clear (to the reader) problems or motivations, run on sentences (even though I'd been trying to write short noir-like sentences, a few of my run-ons still came through). A couple specific pieces of advice:
-Tell what people do--and fail at--and not what they nearly do
-Plant seeds of sympathy for a character early on--if they're not redeemable, they're not sympathetic
-"As above, so below": try making the characters (microcosm) reflect the setting (macrocosm)
Most fun though was talking about cursing though (a subject I'd never considered in much depth before, but *now* I certainly have). Expanding on what I'd already learned from both Debra Doyle's lecture and the sample curses I'd collected earlier in the week, Cory taught me an incredibly valuable lesson, that cursing is more effective and interesting when it gets very specific. To wit: "The ocean below was as smooth as a teenage girl's ass" is decent, but more outrageous (and therefore more interesting and more indicative of character) would be "The ocean below was as smooth as a 14 year-old Thai hooker's ass." (And believe me, that was one of the more mildly offensive bits that came out of this character.) I may or may not put this new knowledge to use in my fantasy novel when I revise, we shall see!
Way back on Wednesday, I'd gotten up the gumption to ask Cory for an unscheduled meeting (I wish now that I'd asked Steve Gould and Laura Mixon too, but I didn't want to be greedy or presumptuous about their time, so sadly, I did not. On Thursday, in a fit of optimism, I asked Cory if I could have him critique my fledgling new short story rather than the submission piece of the novel. (Even with the motivation of knowing Cory would be reading it, I didn't manage to finish the foul-mouthed pilot story, but I figured it was more up Cory's alley than my fantasy novel chapters.) So Friday before lunch, we went up to Cory's room for a brief meeting that I wish I could have dragged out for hours, it was so helpful (and enjoyable). I found Cory really easy to talk to, and he always brought up interesting thoughts and thereby encouraged me to do the same. He started by asking me why I'd come to VP, how it had been going for me so far, and if I'd gotten what I wanted out of my VP experience. All interesting questions, and a great way to begin the process of reflection that I've been continuing here in this blog for the last 3 weeks.
Then we got into talking more specifically about my foul-mouthed pilot story (which for the record was called "What You Really Need As Much As A Hole In The Head"), and once again it was a great reinforcement for some of the specific writing craft I'd learned (or re-learned) over the last week. Many of issues as a writer, which I am now becoming intimately more familiar with, were reflected here as well: wandering beginnings with too much muddling about finding my way into the character and the story (the "your story doesn't begin until page 10" problem), characters without clear (to the reader) problems or motivations, run on sentences (even though I'd been trying to write short noir-like sentences, a few of my run-ons still came through). A couple specific pieces of advice:
-Tell what people do--and fail at--and not what they nearly do
-Plant seeds of sympathy for a character early on--if they're not redeemable, they're not sympathetic
-"As above, so below": try making the characters (microcosm) reflect the setting (macrocosm)
Most fun though was talking about cursing though (a subject I'd never considered in much depth before, but *now* I certainly have). Expanding on what I'd already learned from both Debra Doyle's lecture and the sample curses I'd collected earlier in the week, Cory taught me an incredibly valuable lesson, that cursing is more effective and interesting when it gets very specific. To wit: "The ocean below was as smooth as a teenage girl's ass" is decent, but more outrageous (and therefore more interesting and more indicative of character) would be "The ocean below was as smooth as a 14 year-old Thai hooker's ass." (And believe me, that was one of the more mildly offensive bits that came out of this character.) I may or may not put this new knowledge to use in my fantasy novel when I revise, we shall see!
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