On the principles of good storytelling...

Warning--spoiler for "The Prestige"

When you tell a story (make a movie, write a novel, etc.), you're building up audience/reader goodwill until the climax. In a story that's built around a mystery, that climax - and the big reveal - has to be very good to keep the audience from feeling like they've been cheated. After all, if the story has been done well, they have a strong emotional investment in what happens to the characters.

But if you take the easy way out, your audience will feel like they've been cheated. Secret twins revealed in the last 5 minutes are definitely the easy way out. And no amount of gratuitous Christian Bale can make up for that.

Work time!

Fall break begins tomorrow, and I plan to devote all my free time (i.e. time not spent seeing new movies, eating normal food, buying clothes, or writing papers) revising my current novel and coming up with a plan for this year's NaNo.

See you on the other side.

Unnecessary planning

You know how you can tell that you're putting something off? When you create a four-year course plan for yourself "just to make sure" that you'll have the credits necessary to complete a very, very lax major. Of the 124 credits required for graduation from my college, only 20 are dictated by the English major guidelines. Despite this, my course plan somehow includes 40 credits' worth of English classes - including all 16 possible credits of writing workshop classes.

Ah, well. I'm sure I'll change my mind.

In other news, my NaNo novel continues to have no real plot. Or believable characters. But I'm hesitant to outline, because I suspect that if I have an outline going into NaNo I'll get trapped in it.

Also, I've rediscovered both Tegan & Sara and The Strokes. Excellent writing music all around.

Icon

So MiriMirror, over on the NaNo forums, made me this pretty icon for my total fluff chicklit possible NaNo, and I'm very appreciative. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't want to let the animation work, but if you head over to my profile on NaNo and look at one of my posts, you can totally see it. It's awesome.

In other news...not much to share. Finding out which others will be partaking in NaNo so we can set up a support group. Oh, and I found myself a writing "enemy" to compete with and help spur me on. Another college freshman, so that's cool.

Put a possible plotline up for adoption over in the NaNo Adopt-a-Plot thread. Other than that, I haven't gotten much done today - mostly just slept off the aftermath of the biggest party of the first semester here at college.

A cool reference book that I found for possible NaNo use: The Bartender's Guide to Cocktails & Mixed Drinks, by Stuart Walton. Lots of very pretty pictures of drinks, and could definitely be useful for talking about college students.

Oh, a nifty plot idea if I ever felt like doing it - a series of interconnected vignettes, each based on a different cocktail (and named after said cocktail). That could be very cool, actually - each drink lending its characteristics to the MC of that vignette...

I should get around to writing that someday. Maybe for NaNo 2007. Or even this year...

The grad school game

I don't know why I'm even thinking about this yet, but lately here at college everyone has been freaking out over B+ grades on papers. And me, I'm suddenly a teeny bit worried because if my high school performance (and my performance here so far) is anything to go by, I'm looking at a B/B+ average for my entire time here.

(She says, after six weeks)

Anyway, I've been taking a look around at graduate programs, and here's what I've found. If I go to graduate school and get an MFA in Creative Writing, I'm staring down two more years of higher education. Granted, most/all of the courses will be writing workshops, which I enjoy far more than literature analysis courses, but it'll still be lots of work.

There's also the question of whether I want to spend another $30,000 on going to graduate school when I could do a lot with that money. Get my pilot's license. Move to Anegada or Tortola in the British Virgin Islands and fly a seaplane. Spend all my time writing there and forget about most of the rest of the world. $30,000 can take you very far in the BVI. Especially if you just accept the fact that sometimes, you're not going to have any electricity. Maybe it's something in the blood - my mom lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands and absolutely loved it.

But - the graduate programs.
University of Iowa
University of British Columbia
Purdue University
University of Oregon

Cheers.

Writing music

Top Ten list of songs to write to:
1. "Bohemian Like You", The Dandy Warhols
2. "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor", Arctic Monkeys
3. "Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt", We Are Scientists
4. "I Hate It That I Got What I Wanted", Clearlake
5. "I Want You So Hard (Boys Bad News)", Eagles of Death Metal
6. "You're the Reason I'm Leaving", Franz Ferdinand
7. "Ring of Fire", Johnny Cash
8. "I Wanna Be Sedated", The Ramones
9. "Reach for the Sky", Social Distortion
10. "Still in Love Song", The Stills

Somehow, I just write better with music. If you haven't heard of these bands, go look them up. They're all good.

I dare you...

So, I've been spending a lot of homework time in the NaNoWriMo Dares forum, and here's my list of dares that I'll be trying to work into my 2006 NaNo:

• Write a scene entirely dedicated to the cooking of an egg (guaranteed word padding)
• Have a character who is obsessed with Sharpie pens
• Have a character who swears only in Russian (not too hard, it's an excellent language to swear in)
• Have a scene where two characters throw out innuendo using hockey terminology (this just sounds fun)
• Have someone obsessively crack their knuckles (excellent for building tension)
• Expose an essential plot point during a game of I Never and another during a game of Hopscotch (oh, the possibilities...)
• Have a character who's holding a drink in all his scenes
• Include a character with synesthesia (I love this idea)
• Have a random karaoke contest
• Have characters who actually use the bathroom - double bonus points if there's a line
• Have a character who refers to his/her boyfriend/girlfriend in every conversation
• Have a character who is constantly on his cell phone
• Have a character who continuously tries to do things like drink a gallon of milk in an hour or lick his elbow

This gives me plenty of ideas...too bad it's not already November 1. At least this way I get a little more planning time!

The countdown begins.

So I've started thinking about my 2006 NaNo. Not quite sure what it'll be yet - going back and forth between a "modern piracy" story and a very fluffy sort of chicklit about eight college students and an extended psych experiment at their university. I know my characters - or at least have a vague idea of them - and I have some plans roughly sketched out in my head for plot possibilities. Right now, I'm leaning towards the chicklit story, just because I'm too attached to making the "modern piracy" story something halfway decent. The college student story has more options for wacky hijinks to ensue and take up more space.

At this point, I'd like to take a moment to remember two previous NaNo novels. Anno Novae was my first attempt at a NaNo. I signed up on October 31st, the day I learned about NaNo, and made it to 19,180 words before I realized that I had a research paper due at the end of November. In my senior year of high school, fall semester grades took precedence over everything else.

Then, in August, I did National Novel Writing Day, or the 24-Hour Novel Challenge, which required only 40,000 words to win. The novel, about four friends on a road trip who end up in an alternative timeline fighting a continuation of World War II, clocked in at 40,023 words. It was such an adrenaline rush that I wished I'd discovered it much earlier.

Now, as a college freshman - well, who knows if I'll finish? On the other hand, if I taped all the shows I watch during the month of November and watched them over winter vacation instead, I'd have an additional...seven hours every week. During the 24-Hour Novel Challenge, I wrote an average of 1667 words per hour; if I do that during NaNo, I can complete my novel simply in the time that I would have spent watching TV. Awesome.