Let’s Watch More Star Wars!

That’s what Lexi exclaimed when the credits for Return of the Jedi rolled. It makes a father proud.

We’ve been watching the Star Wars series the last few weeks. It happened by accident. I felt like watching a movie in the basement with the fire going and I decided it’d be Star Wars. I’ve always wanted to watch these movies with my kids, but Lexi is still freaked out about the bad guys in Disney princess movies and if she can’t handle a weird, cartoony sea witch, she’d be no match for Darth Vader. My earliest movie going experience is watching Vader through my hands. The intensity can be pretty scary for a little kid.

So I didn’t expect Lexi to sit down with me and watch the first Star Wars movie. I didn’t expect Milo to sit around either. But they did. They missed parts here and there and I think that helped to break up the intensity, but we watched Star Wars together. There was much hiding under blankets and even a teary goodnight with thoughts of the Rancor, but no matter how many times I suggested we shut it off if it was too scary, they refused.

It helped that Princess Leia is mentioned in the opening crawl of A New Hope. Suddenly it became a princess movie and Lexi was hooked.

And no, there was no consideration of starting with the prequels. That’s not even a question. Though as Lexi talked about watching more Star Wars, I did reluctantly tell her about the prequels. Of course we don’t own them and I’m not rushing out to get them, so she’s safe for now. Besides, I don’t think she’s ready for the intensity of Anakin going bad. Not that she even knows who Anakin is: “Who’s that guy with the thing on his face?” (Darth Vader) “Is that guy Luke’s brother?” (Han Solo) “Where’s the princess?” (during a scene where Han & Leia kiss) “Where’s that Empire guy?” (The Emperor) “Hey! We have a Lego of him! (Yoda).

Though though they did love the Ewoks (Milo: “Look at the teddy bear!”) and Milo thought it was hilarious when the Ewok steals the speeder and spins upside down. Lexi also pointed and laughed during the celebration scene when the Ewoks use stormtrooper helmets as drums (which is frightfully morbid when you think about it). Both of which reminded me how much these movies were made for kids with the necessary humor built in to relieve the tension. I also couldn’t help but feel smug when Lexi was confused by the scenes of galactic celebration that George Lucas added to the end of Return of the Jedi. You shouldn’t muck with a good thing, George.

If you can’t already tell, these movies are deeply ingrained in my psyche and I’m thrilled to finally share them with my kids. I never thought it’d be in such a random, slipshod fashion, but it works. Sometimes it’s better to let these moments sneak up on you.

 

Lessons from a Reader: Show the Expertise

I’ve shared a few lessons from readers and it struck me that it would also be helpful to include some positive ideas. Complaining about every book I read makes me sound like quite the jackass.

One thing I love to see in books I read is expertise. When you can tell that somebody knows what they’re talking about, when they can describe something with such detail that they’ve clearly become an expert—that rocks. It doesn’t matter if they’re actually an expert or they’re just really good at faking it. However they do it, I love it.

One example is in Ashfall by Mike Mullin. And it happens several times throughout the book. I may not believe him about the weight of ash, but he shows his expertise in other areas. The main character, Alex, knows his taekwondo. He knows how to handle a bo staff and knows how to take down a much larger opponent. And it’s presented in a realistic, I-learned-in-a-safe-class type way. He’s horrified when he accidentally kills an opponent and compares striking someone in the face to hitting the punching bag. Not only does the writing describe these skills in a way only an expert could, but he works in those details in a realistic way that’s authentic to the character (Note: Don’t work in details just to show off your research).

Later Alex encounters Darla and she knows her way around the farm. When she skins a rabbit, jury rigs a toilet, or makes a homemade smoke house, it’s completely believable.

I remember another example from Open Heart by Frederick Buechner that I read an excerpt of in college. It so perfectly captured a high school classroom that years later I had to track down the book and read it. I first read that passage more than a decade ago and I still remember it. Expertise doesn’t necessarily have to be skills, it’s the experiences that make your writing completely believable.

I could read good expertise writing all day long. It doesn’t matter if the skill is accounting or unloading a truck, if you do it right it can be mesmerizing.

Lessons from a Reader: Faith is Tricky

Another lesson I learned from Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer is that tackling faith is tricky. And this comes from someone who writes for religious audiences for a living and has read quite a lot of Christian fiction.

One of the secondary characters in Life As We Knew It is a Christian. She’s preachy, self-righteous and irritating. Now we can argue about whether or not that’s a stereotype. But I can live with it—Christians often come across that way. But you have to make it believable. It doesn’t help that you’re already going off on politics, now religion too?

What sunk this sub-plot for me was the stilted dialogue when the main character and this preachy Christian interacted. They were supposed to be long time friends, but every time they talked the dialogue suddenly became stiff and memorized and the Christian character preached to her friend and urged her to come to Jesus. Now maybe those conversations are stiff and memorized. But they’re also awkward and difficult and have a very realistic quality to them. Even a Lifetime special has more realistic conversations about serious, weighty topics. People get flustered. They don’t know what to say. They’re passionate, but never perfect. It should move in fits and starts. And if you’re going to use cliches (people use them when they talk, so that’s fine in dialogue), you have to poke holes in them (because that’s what people do in real life).

The worst mistake in handling faith came later in the story when [SPOILER ALERT] the Christian character had died and the main character was confronting the reverend who inspired the Christian character’s stiff faith. While everyone else is starving to death (including the now-dead Christian character), the reverend was plump and healthy. Here we go: The age old bad preacher bit. This is such a tired stereotype. Once again, I get it. It happens in real life. But give it a purpose in your story. In Life As We Know It it didn’t seem to have a greater purpose. It was just a swipe at religion.

As a writer, you should be better than that. If you don’t like religion, that’s fine. But write a real diatribe against it. Don’t set up straw men you can knock down.

Fun With Lego

Kevin's TowerIt started just before Christmas. I had a small stash of Legos in an old cigar box in my office. I haven’t played with them a in a while, but for some reason they came out and Lexi was playing with them. But we needed more.

Then Abby brought home a bucket from school, several hundred bricks. That’s when the addiction set in. It was enough to start building, but not enough to actually create anything. We didn’t have enough of one color or enough of the right pieces.

At Christmas just about everybody in the family got Legos. We spent most of our Christmas money buying more Legos online and by January we had to start sorting our Legos by color.

And so the building began. Houses, skycrapers, cars.

I’d forgotten how fun Legos can be.

Lessons from a Reader: Don’t Be Dumb

One of the most frustrating things as a reader is when I watch a character make dumb mistakes for no reason. Now maybe they’re a dumb character so they’re going to make dumb mistakes. That works if you know they’re dumb, like Joey on Friends. But for most characters if they make a dumb mistake, it’s because the writer is being dumb.

Case in point: Trapped by Michael Northrop. Seven teens are trapped in their high school when the mother of all snowstorms blows through, dumping more than a dozen feet of snow. After an appropriate amount of time the students realize they’re trapped, alone and rescue isn’t coming. They need supplies: Light, heat, food. They raid the cafeteria, so food is covered. They find blankets in the nurses office. A radio in the office. Eventually they’re forced to create a fire barrel using material scavenged from metal shop.

But that’s it. No flashlights. No candles. No extra batteries. The students never bother to scour the rest of the school for supplies. They can’t even get all the food out of the cafeteria because it’s too dark and the cell phones they’ve been using as flashlights are all dying. There should be a flashlight in every teacher’s desk. Somebody surely has candles. The home economics room should be a goldmine. The janitor’s closet and boiler room, normally off-limits to students should be tempting and well-stocked. And when it gets really bad, they could start breaking into all the lockers. Surely they’d find more winter gear, batteries, flashlights, lighters, snacks, medicine.

But no. Rather than thoroughly scavenge for supplies, they huddle around the second story windows desperate for light.

But they’re not dumb students. That’s dumb writing.

(I feel a little bad calling a professional writer’s work dumb. Northrop told an otherwise solid and gripping story. I give him props for that. But this oversight crippled the reality of the situation. And it’s an easy fix. I’m just calling it like I see it as an annoyed reader, in hopes that I don’t make the same mistakes.)

Lessons from a Reader: Resolve Relational Tension

What I’m going to call ‘relational tension’ is at the center of just about every story. It’s the conflict between two characters where you can’t tell if they’re going to be friends or enemies, lovers or acquaintances. It’s usually romantic tension, but not always.

If you’re using that kind of tension in a story, you need to resolve it by the end. You can’t just leave us hanging.

This isn’t a TV series where that tension is the heart of the show and you can let it stretch on forever. And in most cases, when that tension is resolved the show loses it’s heart and flounders for something new (see: Buffy and Angel, Lorelia and Luke, Jim and Pam, Castle and Beckett [they haven’t resolved it yet, but you can tell that’s their struggle], Mal and Inara, Angel and Cordelia [Joss Whedon is good at relational tension]).

If it’s a love story they get together at the end. If it’s a tragedy they split at the end. If it’s horror one of them gets killed. That’s simplistic, but the point is something happens by the end.

I was reading Enclave by Ann Aguirre and [SPOILER ALERT], they never resolved this tension. Now it wasn’t central to the story. But two characters were forced together. They were navigating a post-apocalyptic world and facing death side by side. Their relationship was developing, but it was undefined. Then a third character was introduced and suddenly this relational tension developed. The dreaded triangle.

But the story ended before it was resolved. The girl didn’t pick one guy over the other. She didn’t choose to be alone. She didn’t even decide not to choose. It just ended with her clearly attracted to both guys, having developed connections with both of them, but nothing happening.

It was a good story. Unique and compelling with interesting twists and turns. The writer was even brave enough to abandon one world and introduce a new one halfway through, which is no easy feat. But the unresolved tension left a bad taste in my mouth. The central question of survival for any post-apocalyptic story was answered, but the remaining tension didn’t make for a satisfying ending.

Give us a satisfying ending. I don’t care if we cry or cheer, but give us closure.

Lessons from a Reader: Make Science Believable

The greatest sin in science fiction is when your science isn’t believable. Yes, it’s science fiction, so it doesn’t have to be true, but you should at least make it believable. It doesn’t have to be possible, but your job is to make me think it’s possible.

My current example for this is Ashfall by Mike Mullen. A super volcano has erupted, covering Iowa in a foot or two of ash. It’s also been raining, turning the ash into a wet slurry. But suddenly that wet ash is causing buildings to collapse. Not one or two, but almost every building collapsing under the weight of a few feet of ash.

Huh? Is ash really that heavy? We easily had two feet of accumulated snow last year and roofs weren’t collapsing. I have a hard time believing that ash is that much heavier than snow.

Now I’m just a dumb reader, what do I know? I didn’t do the research: Apparently ash is heavier than snow. But you have to make it convincing. Give me reasons to believe the science (especially if your science is indeed fiction). In this case it could have been a simple comment comparing ash and snow. Or a little more variation on which buildings collapsed (my take on the research suggests that in an area with heavy snowfall like Iowa, more of the buildings would have survived).

In the end you want your reader thinking about your characters, in this case worrying how he’s going to make it and if he’ll be reunited with his family. You don’t want your reader focusing on something silly, like whether or not ash could collapse roofs.

Lessons from a Reader: Keep Your Opinions Out Of It

I’ve been reading a lot lately. I’m currently on book number 18 of 2012. With all that reading there are some things I like and some things I can’t stand.

One thing I’ve always wished I was better at was taking lessons from what I read and applying that to what I write. Being a writer you’d think that would be obvious, but it never is. I’m the kind of reader that wants to know what’s going to happen next, so I usually fly through the text and don’t slow down enough to learn some lessons as a writer.

So I’m going to start posting these notes to myself, these lessons from a reader so maybe I can start saving some of this insight.

Keep Your Opinions Out Of It
When you’re writing fiction, I don’t care about your politics. In Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer the character’s mother (Who also happens to be a writer—oh my gosh, stop making your characters writers, it comes across as lazy! Research another career.) goes off on Fox News and the president encamped at a Texas ranch. Gee, which president could that be?

Obviously the author is not a fan of George W. Bush. But who cares? It doesn’t help the story. You just turned your character into a stereotype and needlessly annoyed half your audience. And for what? Nothing.

There are times when political opinions are necessary in fiction, but make them necessary. They should make the character three dimensional, adding intrigue and depth, not cardboard flatness.

5 Minutes a Day

I recently read Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination by Hugh MacLeod. I mean, why wouldn’t you read a book called Evil Plans?

It’s another book about creativity and striking out on your own, written by a guy who made a name for himself by drawing cartoons on the backs of business cards. That’s all well and good, but sometimes I think these kind of screeds are a little too niche. Some people like having a 9-to-5 job and working for an employer and that doesn’t make them brainless schlubs. Maybe more people can and do have their Evil Plan side projects today than ever before, but that doesn’t mean it’s for everybody.

But that’s my own rant on rants like this. What I really wanted to talk about was one of the brilliant thoughts that stuck with me from the book:

“Like a very talented pianist once told me when I was a boy, it’s better to practice a musical instrument for five minutes a day than to practice for two hours once a week. It’s something I never forgot.” (page 39)

Five minutes a day is better than two hours once a week. If you’re serious about anything, if you want to get good at anything, if you want to tackle a tough project, you need this advice (read: I need this advice).

It’s the consistency that wins over time, not the herculean effort.

And really, if you love it, you’ll find those five minutes are never enough and you’ll start to make more time. But at least take those five minutes.

(My problem is I can never stick to just five minutes and it turns into two hours and the next day I can’t afford to dive in so deeply, so I don’t. I need to learn some self-control. Or I need an egg timer. Or maybe a real egg timer.)

And yes, this is just a gimmick. It’s like all the other ideas, techniques and tricks out there to get you to do something: National Novel Writing Month, inbox zero, pick your favorite Lifehacker gem. But let’s call them what they are: gimmicks. Designed to get us to accomplish a task we can’t otherwise seem to do. Another comment MacLeod makes is that we’re just primates, and like primates we need to be tricked into accomplishing something.

I’m Not Blogging Right

I don’t think I’m blogging right. There’s lots of advice out there about how writers are supposed to blog and the importance of having a web presence and putting yourself out there and all that. And I think I’m doing it wrong.

And I don’t care.

They tell you you’re supposed to blog a lot. I don’t. I only posted once in January.

They tell you you’re supposed to at least blog consistently. I don’t. I posted once in January and now I’m going two days straight.

They tell you you’re supposed to have a personal brand, a niche, a specialty that you’re known for. I don’t. I write about whatever I feel like here, which means I’m all over the map. For goodness sake, I blog about when I turn on the heat every year.

They tell you you’re supposed to polish everything and put your best work forward. I don’t. I spend all day writing polished copy for clients and when it comes to my blog, some days I want to wing it.

They tell you to post at the same time and not post multiple posts at once. OK, I follow that bit of advice. But not because it builds a consistent audience with consistent content. I do it because I hate it when my RSS feed gets clogged with multiple posts from the same site. Too many posts in one day and I feel overwhelmed, like I can’t catch up. So I like to spread my posts out a bit if  I can.

They tell you you’re supposed to keep your site current, up to date and well designed. I don’t. Let’s face it, this site has no design. I haven’t even updated my company site in over a year. It doesn’t even list one of my newest and biggest clients.

(OK, not updating my company site is actually dumb. I’ve been meaning to do something about that, but it needs a complete redesign and I don’t have time [or energy] for that. Though every time I redesign that site I try to make it require less and less maintenance. At this rate I should just make a single page that requires zero updating. Ever. Hmm… tempting.)

They tell you you’re supposed to build a fan base. I don’t. I mean, I have Twitter followers and Facebook friends and RSS subscribers. I even have an email newsletter, but updates are rare. But I’m not trying to marshal this crowd of ‘Go Kevin’ people. I figure if people like my stuff they’ll follow somehow. I don’t need to constantly flood them with a steady barrage of ‘I’m So Awesome’ updates.

Maybe all that is naive. Maybe I’m squandering my potential. But I don’t care. I started my blog way back in 1998 for me. I still do it for me. I’ve learned that I can’t follow all that advice and still do it for me. If I start following all that advice then I’m doing it for someone else, and that doesn’t work. I mean, I love you folks who keep reading this crazy blog, but I think you understand that I’m not here to sing and dance for you.

This is my blog, my journal, my place to scratch out my thoughts, to try stuff, to rant, to yell, to piss and moan, to remember things and to fail. I’m not one of those people who’s all about me, but this place is all for me. And if that flies in the face of conventional social media guru wisdom, oh well.