Week thirteen

I, unfortunately, wiped out on my bike, and at a very bad time as well. With the writing work due with in the next three weeks, it would have helped a lot if I didn't wipe out. My brakes locked right when I was at top speed coming down from a hill and I did a flip and took a pretty bad spill, so I couldn't get that much work done. Fortunately, thanks to Google spreadsheets, which are available for gmail users, I was able to keep working with Sheryl, but not so well since I could only use one hand (the other one was kinda swollen.) A google spreadsheet is some really handy feature for gmail users. This is how it works. You start a spreadsheet, and give it a name, and then add users to the spreadsheet. Those users can work on the same document as you, and every so often when you click the save button, they can see what you added to the document. With the help of a story outline which Sheryl and I wrote, we managed to get several pages done, and more pages are soon to be completed.

week twelve

During this meeting we read a few books, three of which I am taking home to read, caught up on a few posts in the blog, planned some of the story, and wrote about three paragraphs.

The books are titled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn, which is a series of different stories and poems, How to Grow a Novel, which is all about the problems and mistakes that a writer has while trying to write a story, and how to overcome them, written by Sol Stein (it's really good) and the last book, Neuromancer, is written by a man in Vancouver, Canada named William Gibson.

One of the other things we talked about is dialogue. One thing I learned is to often be indirect when the characters are responding to each other, and there should be tension between the speakers. It should be kind of exciting. You also can't answer all the readers questions to build suspense (avoid questions.) One of the examples from how to grow a novel, from the section which talks about how the answers need to be indirect, as to surprise the reader, is as follows.

She: I see you're feeling better.
He: Since when can you see what I feel?
She:I thought this was going to be a peaceful discussion.
He: That was yesterday.

This is a good example of being surprising and oblique.

week eleven

We looked at a show called Deadwood. It has a great story, and we mainly looked at the dynamics between the characters. We were mainly looking at the main character, Swearingen. His movements, speech, and eye contact are all important, and the people who wrote the script made it so the person who is watching the show can tell most of what is happening through his body movement and the tone of his voice. We looked at characters, the way they act, how Swearingen controls everybody, and how he relates to the antagonist. We also looked at how the characters look and how their clothing corresponds to the way they act. For example, the dandy guy from New York in the show, Deadwood, acted all stuck up and thought he had all the cards on Swearingen because of an acquaintance of his from New York, and the way he acted kind of reminds you of one of those sort of characters because he has a tight collar and a bow tie.

What I found interesting about this show was the setting. It takes place in a western town called Deadwood, where many people have struck it rich. There is no police officers or law inforcers yet, so people can basically do what ever they please. Every character has their own deep story line just about them. Some people have known eachother since childhood and they are still good friends, others have almost died, some have killed people, some have reputations, and others have a past that makes them what they are now.

week ten

On this week I mainly just wrote on Sheryll's laptop. I was trying to figure out what to do with the character. Over time we have changed and improved the story, and we even took out one of the main parts because we felt it would be a much more interesting story if we did. While I was writing, I was trying to get Mike, the main character, to look like more of a tough guy, and I also tried to get him to meet his brother. In the end we took his brother out of the story entirely, but I thought I put his brother in quite well. He's browsing through some phone books because he wants to buy a pizza, when suddenly he recognizes a name at the top of the page. He and his brother have different last names, and the one on the top of the page was his brothers, so he looks down and there is his brothers name. He meets up with his brother and the conversation went ok, but I think doing something so big like that in such a short time is kind of dramatic, because his brother was going to be the main part of the story and that wouldn't exactly work.

week nine

We did some writing excersises on dialogue. The excersise went like this. Each character could only say three words everytime we spoke, and the point was to not get everything in, just get the basic message across. For example: John pulled the dog leash from a hanger, put it on his dog, and opened the door to give the dog a walk. Next sentence, simplified. John walked his dog. It improves your skills in dialogue because you get don't get to complicated in what you write, and you leave some for the reader to think about themselves. If you write something like a movie script, writing every single action, it might be annoying for the reader.