Category Archives: Life

World-Building and the “Yes, And”

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My own writing lately has been a broad adventure story, hopefully of novel length and hopefully better than some of the junk I’ve been writing lately. Part of the process of writing a science fiction or fantasy story of any kind is to do what’s called world-building. For some people, it’s the most fun part of writing and it’s all they ever really do – these people often become game designers.

But I’m interested in telling a story about a particular kind of character best served by the genre of adventure genre fiction. He’s a character that has been gnawing at my brain for almost two decades and I think I finally have the skill to write a story about him.

But rather than just write about the character I also have to build a universe around him, or at least create a universe in which that character can live and thrive and suffer and succeed and and fail and all that exciting drama stuff.

Here’s the next layer: a genre universe must operate on a definable set of rules. The rules are what mark the boundaries of drama – there’s no point in mentioning the rules if the characters aren’t going to encounter them. These rules can be outlandish and ridiculous, but they must always be internally consistent. If these rules are broken then the tension is hopelessly broken, not because of a resolved dramatic moment (which is how the author wants to break tension), but because the tightened band suddenly has too much slack. If I tell you that the only thing that can kill a werewolf is silver and then depict a werewolf being killed by a golden bullet, then what was the point in telling you the rule in the first place? When another werewolf appears and the character has nothing made out of silver within reach, then any tension created by that drama is practically nonexistent.

The question facing me tonight is how much of the world to build before I write the narrative. I know that the world and its rules will have a bearing on the narrative – I know that the characters will operate within and encounter the edges of what their universe allows, but I am hesitant to establish too many of those rules in advance.

Creating the universe first is supposedly what Tolkien did before writing the Lord of the Rings. it’s also the legendary origin of the Star Wars universe – fans often reference the three-ring binder that held all of George Lucas’s ideas for a vast, multi-trilogy series of movies and of which the two trilogies we have are all he saw fit to make.

The result is the appearance of a handful of characters crawling across the surface of a massive history. The stories read more like nonfiction than anything else, which is precisely what the authors had in mind. The universe becomes more important than the story, which is fine for a multipart franchise, but it doesn’t matter as much as the story you’re trying to tell in the moment. It’s hard to keep an audience’s attention when you’re teaching them history.

This isn’t what I’m going to do because I can spend days or weeks making a universe and lose sight of the story I was trying to tell in the first place – a story about characters and plot rather than the universe around them.

So, I’m thinking I’m going to do it the fun way and just create the world as I go.

The fun part is doing it like one does improv theater – the “Yes, and -”

Improv theater is ostensibly a bunch of performers adding to a collective narrative. One person adds one aspect, another person adds the next, etc. You never say “no,” to someone’s input. It’s the piling of one incongruous element on top of another that makes it fun to do and fun to watch.

A good example of how not to improv is illustrated perfectly in this clip from 30 Rock:

In the context of a fully-realized narrative, you have the luxury of not being forced into anything – instead of the above example, you can have Sling Blade meet Darth Vader, or have them fight or whatever. Writing is a solitary effort, and completely independent of the wishes of anyone but the author.

My wishes are that I’m going to make a whole, big universe around my characters and hope the whole thing makes sense when I’m done.

Living With Mental Patients

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With a few rare, sad, tragic exceptions, the people in my family tend to live a long time with relatively few health defects, only to spend most of their lives in utter misery, punctuated at the end with a large, delirious question mark. So, while I should have little fear of diabetes, cancer, schizophrenia or heart disease, the nature of the preceding sentence is such that I do anyway. I’m not a hypochondriac – they always think they’re sick. I’m a catastrophic – I don’t get sick very often, but when I do it’s like Starbucks coffee – far more unpleasant in practice and almost certainly lethal.

But that’s not what this is about. This is about the middle part of my thesis – the part about utter misery.

We aren’t miserable for any tangible reason, but the misery comes and we throw a blanket over it and write a name on it, like “MY JOB” or “MY RELATIONSHIP” or “THE CERTAINTY OF A LONELY DEATH.” My generation is lucky, because we have ways of dealing with it rather early in our lives. These methods include stuff like drugs and therapy, items that allow us to use our natural faculties to rip the blanket off and see that the thing underneath it isn’t a thing at all, or that it’s actually a part of us, or something else metaphorical.

I keep using “we,” but I’m only speaking about myself.

I had an appointment with my psychiatrist the other day, as people like me sometimes do. I was filling him in on some of my thought processes and some of my problems. He nodded and shook his head and and leaned forward and said, in an exasperated way: “Jim, you’re really hard on yourself.”

Yeah. I know.

But not as much as I used to be.

I have a story for you to read

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I’m not going to send you to my blog, though. I’m just going to post something here asking if anybody wants to read it for me and help me finish it.

I don’t need you to write anything, but I would like some feedback on how I can improve it. You’ve probably already read it, if you’ve known me long enough. Here is where I sigh.

I have a problem finishing things. It’s actually a complete story, but it still feels unfinished.

Anyone?

My Favorite Animal Is…

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I have finally picked my favorite animal. Some of you might be surprised by my choice.

My favorite animal is not the dog, which shouldn’t be that shocking. Dogs aren’t animals, they’re very furry people with sharp teeth and the good graces to not comment on how fat you are when you get naked in front of them. Having said that, dogs are definitely my favorite kind of person.

I arrived at my choice purely by accident. I was thinking about different animals and how gross most of them are. I’ve built up quite a mental library of disgusting facts about various animals over the years, and my favorite animal seems to have the fewest of them. If dogs weren’t people, they would probably have the most, a list which includes eating their own vomit, which might be the grossest thing an animal or person could do.

Another gross animal fact: a mother mouse will sometimes devour her entire brood. That means she eats her babies, which is something I thought was never supposed to happen.

My favorite anima doesn’t do that. My favorite animal doesn’t even have teeth.

And now, the big reveal: my favorite animal is the duck.

Look at this picture and tell me it doesn’t make you happy to be alive:

Here’s why the duck is my favorite animal:

1) They’re fluffy and smooth at the same time.

2) They have snowy white feathers.

3) They have an innate sense of style, since white and bright orange look so great together.

4) They never get wet, even though they spend their lives in water.

5) They can swim, walk and even fly.

6) They make a very funny noise that is even spelled funny.

I don’t have a pet duck, because they’re wild animals and wild animals don’t make very good pets. I also don’t want duck poop all over my house, which is one of the few gross things that ducks do.

If there is a special hell for ducks, I bet it’s empty.

A Brief History of Me (Abridged)

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Because this domain is named after me, it’s probably going to be the one I keep for, like, ever. Pursuant to that, I’ve integrated all of my oldest blogs into this blog, starting in the summer of 2002, a mere month after I moved to Pittsburgh. Back in those days, we didn’t have to title our blogs, so they’re currently kind of tough to access (because of a quirk of the blog template I’m using). I’ll go through eventually and title them, so everybody can see what life in the early aughts. Those blog posts go up as far as my marriage, but the divorce and subsequent life-changing events are covered by my other blogs, which are currently incapable of being integrated into this one.

Before I started this blog, I was cross-posting between my MySpace blog and my VOX blog. You know what those two platforms have in common?

SANDBOXES.

See, you can post all sorts of stuff there as much as you like, and it’s all integrated together into a big social network. Websites make money mostly through advertising – the more eyeballs they have looking at their website, the more money they make. They will let you write as much content for their free service, but they don’t want you to be able to take your content somewhere else.

It’s hard to argue with the logic behind it. They own the bandwidth, and they’ve done the development for the web apps that let everything work so well together. It makes sense for them to want to protect their investment. Even so, it’s not playing fair.

As a contrast, Google’s Blogger service lets you export your blogs anywhere you’d like, and in any format you like.

But VOX and MySpace don’t let you export your work in any form of any kind, except as RSS feeds, which are truncated or otherwise altered to prevent the sort of thing I’m doing with my Tumblr feed (which you can see displayed here), or to prevent the sort of things I very much want to do with my sandboxed blogs.

So until either site lets you do what you want with your own work, there will be a two year gap in the History of Jim, Late 20s Edition.

Things You Should Use

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“Things,” as I use it, refers to technological tools. Most of them have a social component, which is why I want you to use them, too. They’re not very useful without other folks to play with.

Facebook. I’ve been harping about this for a long time, but nobody really listens. That’s ok. All social networking sites are toilets, but if you have to take a dump you might as well enjoy it. I won’t bore you with another detailed treatise on the virtues of Facebook over MySpace, but I will implore you to make an account and join me!

Twitter. You all know what a blog is, right? Well, Twitter is like a blog and an instant messenger in one. Some are calling it a microblog, because no post can be longer than 160 characters.

Why such a seemingly arbitrary limit? Because that’s the maximum number of characters for most text messages! It’s made to operate inside the parameters of your current text message usage – you post a Twitter and it is broadcast to all of your “followers.” Likewise, if one of the people you follow posts a Twitter, you can choose to have it delivered to your phone. iPhone users will find it even easier, with a little program called Twitterific.

You should join this, too, and join me and my sister and a bunch of her friends in our never-ending conversation! I’m jamesforeman. Follow me!

Google Reader. If you already have a Google Account, then you already have access to one of the most useful apps I’ve ever used. Do you know what RSS is? You see it all over the place on the web, but you might not know what it is. Well, RSS is a means of delivering content, just like the web is. You get a feed reader and “subscribe” to RSS feeds using that feed reader. Most feed readers are separate applications you run on your computer, but the best one is built right into Google.

RSS feeds are like newspaper subscriptions, except for reading blogs and other sites that are updated frequently. With one click, you can share interesting articles with the world at large or email them to your friends.

You can read about it more here.

My Blog. I’ll continue to cross-post to MySpace, because that’s where a moderate portion of my audience still sees my stuff, but that won’t last forever. I would implore you, my loyal MySpace readers, to add a link to my blog to your list of sites you visit. There’s lots more there than just what you’ve read here! Here’s the link: JamesForeman.com.