No, my precious!

Since I am not a published author and I am too lazy to come up with my own, I have been using Nathan Bransford's revising checklist to edit my book. And this was how I felt when I first read his list: 

(oh my God my book is pathetic why did I start writing it in the first place MY LIFE SUCKS)

My book needed help. A lot of it. So, for a couple of weeks I danced around the prospect of actually sitting down and editing it. And finally, about a week ago, a dived headfirst into the process. 

Tips on How to Start and Carry Out the Editing Process:

1. Be a lazy jerk. 

Give your work to other people. And why not? Throw in the revising checklist, too. 

There's only so far you can go on your own. As you read your own writing, it's sometimes hard to put yourself in the mindset of a casual reader. If you give your work to other people, you are likely to get feedback that points out mistakes you wouldn't have noticed on your own. 

2. Make your characters your BFFLs. 

When it comes to your characters, don't concern yourself with personality, body expressions, or tone of voice. Focus on one thing: motivation. Why does that character exist? What is the purpose of that character in terms of plot? As long as you CONSTANTLY have your characters' motivations in mind, the rest will almost certainly fall into place. 

If you ask yourself, "What is my character's motivation?" and you can't come up with an answer, TAKE THAT CHARACTER OUT. Flat characters, or useless characters, do nothing to support the book, so you might as well remove them.ed

3. If it doesn't help the plot, TAKE IT OUT (please note how that was in all caps). 

Whether it's characters, scenes, or subplots, if it doesn't help the overall plot line, it's not worth keeping it. Don't concern yourself with word count. It's quality, not quantity. 

Make sure EVERY SINGLE SCENE brings the plot forward in some way. Every other scene should involve the main conflict in some form. If not, take it out. 

4. No, my precious! 

As you edit, try not to look at your writing as your own writing. Look at it as someone else's writing. Slash and tear at it as much as you can. Be ruthless. That way, you can (partly)

overcome the need to protect your writing as though it is your precious. 

Hope that helps! 

Science (Fiction) and Faith

            Society has instinctively come to assume that ‘religion’ and ‘faith’ are brother and sister terms with the same meaning. Although Merriam-Webster states that the word ‘faith’ means “belief or trust in God or the doctrines of a religion”, there is one question to ask: Cannot faith also be in something quite isolated from religion itself?

On September 17, 2011, the eleventh episode of the sixth series of the British science fiction TV series Doctor Who premiered on BBC One. In this episode, an alien time traveler named ‘the Doctor’ and his companions Amy and Rory find themselves trapped in a 1980s hotel with constantly shifting and changing corridors. They meet a group of people who all have no clue as to how they arrived in the hotel: Rita, a Muslim medical student, Joe, a gambler, Gibbis, an alien, and Howie, a nerd in his late twenties who lives with his parents. The Doctor eventually realizes that the hotel captures people of ‘great faith’, and a creature lives off their faith by first ‘relocating’ their faith to itself by terrifying them with their worst fear. In their dying moments, the victims lose their personality, worship the creature, and continually utter the words ‘praise him’. The victims lose their faith to the creature, and in doing so, they lose their souls, too.

At one point in the episode, the Doctor says something remarkable about why the hotel is desensitizing its victims by exposing them to their worst nightmare:

It’s not fear. It’s faith. Not just religious faith, but faith in something. Howie believed in conspiracies, that external forces controlled the world. Joe had dice cufflinks and a chain with a horseshoe—he was a gambler. Gamblers believe in luck. They [Rita, Howie, Joe, and Gibbis] all believe there’s something guiding them, about to save them. That’s what it [the creature] replaces. Every time someone was confronted with their most primal fear they fell back on their most fundamental faith…[Amy’s] faith in me is what brought us [the Doctor, Amy, and Rory] here.

           

            There is one phrase in this spiel that stands out with a pale haze of white light hovering around it:

            “Not just religious faith, but faith in something.”

***

            In Life of Pi, Pi, the main character, finds out that his biology teacher, Mr. Kumar, is an atheist. Mr. Kumar states proudly to Pi, “I don’t believe in religion. Religion is darkness.” He then states later that he “believes in the virtues of science.”

            At the age of six, Mr. Kumar fell sick and had lain in bed for six months. Those six months were “the worst days of [his] life. He eventually recovered, but at the “price of his faith”. He firmly believed that “medicine had saved [him], not God”.

            Atheists may not believe in God, but that doesn’t mean they do not believe in anything. Mr. Kumar did not believe in God; he believed in science. As Pi says later in the chapter, “Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak, speaks of faith.”

            There are innumerable types of faith. Yes, there is faith in God (or gods), but there is also faith in a loved one, in science, in luck, even in the most arbitrary fascinations imaginable. Rita had faith in Islam, Amy had faith in the Doctor, Mr. Kumar had faith in science, Joe had faith in luck, and Howie had faith in government conspiracies.

            One may live without religion, but that doesn’t mean one lives without faith.

Sources:

The Wikipedia summary of “The God Complex”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Complex

Digital Spy review of “The God Complex”

digitalspy.com/british-tv/…/doctor-who-the-god-complex-recap.html

“The God Complex” Quotes

planetclaire.org/quotes/doctorwho/series-six/the-god-complex/

The Shmoop page for Life of Pi

shmoop.com/life-of-pi/

“The God Complex” Preview Clip #2

bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00kf4pw

I Can't...Right?

                                     
I think every novel writer goes through it. It's a time when you just can't write...you don't have nearly 2% as much inspiration and hope and excitement as you did before. You keep putting your writing off; you write less often; your writing quality goes down.

And that's okay. Give yourself a break.
But not forever.

When I was in this lull of writing, I had a conversation with a friend, who was reading my developing novel. And she didn't tell me how much she liked it, or even how to improve it. She told me what it was about. She explained to me the plot, the characters, the style of writing, what kind of book it was.

It wasn't like she was talking to me, the author of the book. It was like she was talking to someone who had never read the book before, let alone wrote it.

And she explained the book to me in a way I'd never thought of the book before. All of a sudden, it was a completely different book, it was a completely different manuscript, it was a completely different project. It wasn't my book, it was someone else's book. And now it was my opportunity to work on it.

And I was excited to start something new. You know why? I had a head start: what I'd already written.

(this pictures is by INeedChemicalX on DeviantArt)

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo
National Novel Writing Month

In my quest to write a novel in one school year, I have discovered the wonders of NaNo. 
What is NaNo about, you ask?

It's writing a novel. 
In one month. 
50,000 words long. 

NaNo is a pretty awesome opportunity for writers. It is a chance to loosen up and write down something that has not been thought through at all and will probably be the craziest thing you've ever written. 

But that's okay. Aren't the most amazing things you've ever read also the craziest, most unique things you've ever read?



Come on, a guy living in a hole in a ground? That's a guy with no life, not a mobbit. Wait, a hobbit? 
Kids killing kids? What kind of world is that? Do you actually think that anyone would read something that depressing?
A kid who goes to school at a magical wizard school? Excuse me, but do you think we're five year olds? 



Imagination sometimes comes in a hurry. When you have a short span of time (like a month), your brain is pulling things out of the air. (Please imagine, for a moment, the time when you did not study for a test and in the last five minutes of exam time you wrote down whatever you could think of even though it didn't make complete sense). 

About 100% percent of the time when you're writing your 50,000 NaNo words, whatever you write down is not perfect. 
But it's probably good. 

And there are a lot of people who worked with good and made awesome, right?

*cough cough J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, Suzanne Collins cough cough*

There may be a future for your NaNo novel. But you have to make it. 

P.S.  I love the coffee cup on the NaNo emblem-thingy (because that's what NaNo is all about). 

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words (well, at least 200)

Writing Exercise #1

There's a writing exercise I've always thought was useful:

If you have trouble with word choice or writing descriptively, this is the perfect activity for you. 
1) Find a picture that's meaningful to you (not one of a bee or a butterfly or a box or a cat, something with meaning, that you have to figure out) 
2) Get a pencil and a piece of paper (or your computer). 
3) Describe that picture as well as you can. 

Since number 3 is kind of boring, I've added a twist to the rules (yes I know, I'm a rebel) 

4) Pretend you're a book character, stuck within that picture. Is the picture sad, solemn, happy, spontaneous? Talk from that character's perspective. 

So I'm going to give you an example. I'm going to pretend I'm a hidden character, watching the girl on the steps (if you know where this picture is from, I do too--fish fingers and custard, guys, fish fingers and custard): 

Vacuum 

The dim yellow light flows down the staircase, over her, over the aging carpet, filling the dying room. Her hands are clasped together, hoping.
Hoping for what? I don't know, I don't know. 
She merges with the room, halfway in, halfway out, dying but alive. The blue box, nestled in the corner of the room, it speaks light; it speaks life. 

But what kind of life? Life squeezed and pinched into a science; life where we wonder about how instead of why? A life where science and faith will never unite, and we humans will, no matter what, force them to unite, we will, we must. 
But forever fail. And humans, exasperated, will eliminate faith altogether. 

The light from that box; it's too pure, it's too sweet. 
It's not real. 

Papers scattered, papers scattered. 
I'm not put together. I'm there; I'm not in the right order, though. 

Is a life like that worth it?
A life where we don't know? The pain of love and uncertainty and doubt and melancholy gone, gone forever? But we're left with emptiness instead.  
Is that why she's in between?
Halfway between a meaningless life, and an uncertain death?
Which to choose?
Which to choose...