Once upon a time, in one of my writing workshops, the professor asked me, "Who's your favorite journalist?" I said "Joseph Mitchell," a safe choice. Then she asked me again, "Who's really your favorite journalist?" Considering my style was a far cry from Mitchell's measured and methodical approach, she didn't believe me. I shrugged my shoulders as the class echoed her sentiment. It seemed I had established myself as a "stylistic writer."
I've always tried for an absolute objective voice. When you hear "journalism," that's what you think: a sort of dry, well-researched and authoritative tone on the subject matter. But it was only when I let myself loose did I finally earn recognition. It's been a running theme throughout my life. The moment I "be myself" is when things turn out great. Not only was this true in the classroom, but this was true online as well.
I point to Exhibit A: Love Sick. I've had modest successes before, but Love Sick was when I truly took off and entered the upper strata where kings feasted. I credit my success to the unique and refreshing first-person narrative. Here's the secret: the main character is modeled after me.
That's not to say that girls make me throw up or anything. Those unique character quirks are a result of my research and journalistic ability. It's my job to capture the lives of others. I draw on my own experiences and imagination to imbue the narrative with a sense of realism.
The point I'm trying to get at here is that your writing should be comprised entirely of YOU, of your experiences, of the people you know, of your beliefs, of what you find funny, of what you find offensive, of what scares you, and of all the unique characteristics that constitute YOU.
Of course, this is contingent on your mastery of the basics. Once you've gone as far as you can in the standard first-person past-tense template, that's when you should let it all out. Go wild. Set free all your bad habits, peculiar idiosyncrasies, and questionable preferences. If you like sentence fragments. Put them in. If you like to digress, then digress from the rooftops to the moon and to the stars! If you favor colorful metaphors and similes, then choke your readers with them, shove it down their throats every chance you get. Fancy big words? Type first and look them up later. Repetition? Repeat, repeat, and repeat as many times as necessary. It's only through excess can you find moderation.
Soon, you'll begin to see when too much is too much. You'll realize that your metaphors and similes make no sense, that the objects for comparison bear little relation to each other, that your repetition is really repetitive, that you've been using that word the wrong way this entire time, that your dialogue is super unnatural and stilted, that every character you create talks the same way, that you use the same words over and over, that your description is lacking, that your characterization leaves a lot to be desired, and that you pretty much suck at writing in general.
It's only after you've built up and broken down, can you truly begin to define your own style.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
JomattoStyle: Perspective
Perspective isn't a consideration, it's a foundation you must abide by. It determines how the events are organized and how the action flows. Now before you start getting crazy ideas, I have but one rule for you to follow: stay consistent.
You're only gonna be worrying about two perspectives: first-person and third-person. It's the difference between "I hate you" and "he hates you." Which perspective you adopt hinges on your story idea. Is it going to be an epic with scenes happening in different places at the same time? Go third. Is it going to be about one person and how they grow as an individual? Go first. Once you've selected a perspective, stick to it like Wolverine on a bullet train.
Packaged with perspective is also the issue of verb tenses. Far too often do I read stories where the narrator slips into the future, past, and present all at the same time. It's not just wrong, it's stupid, and ignorant, and an insult to the English language. Okay, it's not that offensive, but it's so pervasive, there should be a Surgeon General's Warning slapped onto every word processor to keep this epidemic from spreading.
I go to school and entered class.
The untrained eye cannot catch this. If you can't see it, then please slap yourself with a dictionary a hundred times until the past and present tense forms of all verbs are seared into your brain. All verbs in a sentence must conform to one tense. There are exceptions (English has many), but this holds fast for 90% of your cases.
For beginners, my advice is to start in first-person, because that's our most familiar reference point. We are always thinking in terms of "I." If you're going to be writing as a character, I strongly urge you to stick with your own gender, not only because of the familiarity, but because you can easily expose yourself if you don't. There's a reason why Victor Frankenstein is an overdramatic, wailing, male lead--he was written by a woman.
For tenses, use the past form. It's the traditional mode of narrative and imposes a level of control necessary for grasping the basics. You don't wanna go fast when you start out, you wanna be slow and methodical. Slow and steady may not win the race, but at least you're not going to screw it up.
You're only gonna be worrying about two perspectives: first-person and third-person. It's the difference between "I hate you" and "he hates you." Which perspective you adopt hinges on your story idea. Is it going to be an epic with scenes happening in different places at the same time? Go third. Is it going to be about one person and how they grow as an individual? Go first. Once you've selected a perspective, stick to it like Wolverine on a bullet train.
Packaged with perspective is also the issue of verb tenses. Far too often do I read stories where the narrator slips into the future, past, and present all at the same time. It's not just wrong, it's stupid, and ignorant, and an insult to the English language. Okay, it's not that offensive, but it's so pervasive, there should be a Surgeon General's Warning slapped onto every word processor to keep this epidemic from spreading.
I go to school and entered class.
The untrained eye cannot catch this. If you can't see it, then please slap yourself with a dictionary a hundred times until the past and present tense forms of all verbs are seared into your brain. All verbs in a sentence must conform to one tense. There are exceptions (English has many), but this holds fast for 90% of your cases.
For beginners, my advice is to start in first-person, because that's our most familiar reference point. We are always thinking in terms of "I." If you're going to be writing as a character, I strongly urge you to stick with your own gender, not only because of the familiarity, but because you can easily expose yourself if you don't. There's a reason why Victor Frankenstein is an overdramatic, wailing, male lead--he was written by a woman.
For tenses, use the past form. It's the traditional mode of narrative and imposes a level of control necessary for grasping the basics. You don't wanna go fast when you start out, you wanna be slow and methodical. Slow and steady may not win the race, but at least you're not going to screw it up.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Change of Direction
I have spent the last five months of my life doing nothing. My friend, David, told me that such a gap in activity raises red flags for any prospective employer, and my own brother warned me that the longer I waited, the hard it'll be to find a new job. I ignored them. After thirteen straight years of compulsory education, and an additional four years of secondary education, and one full year of work, I decided that I could use a break. Not just a month a two, but a full-fledged year of absolute nothingness. I've no debts and built up enough funds to last me until 2014. This was my time to rest and enjoy life, free from responsibility and stress.
It was fantastic! I woke up at my own convenience, time was in abundance, and I could indulge in my hobbies as much as I wanted. I went on a tear, first with a trip to Vegas, spending the longest and strangest night of my life playing penny Poker machines, shared a wild night with a bunch Canadians, and drank at the classiest, flashiest bars the Strip had to offer.
After I got home, I inhaled any piece of media I could get my hands on, devouring all three seasons of Game of Thrones, finishing off the latest runs of The Walking Dead and How I Met Your Mother, completing entire anime series, watching dozens of movies, and even reading a book or two. It was an opportunity to clear out my gaming backlog, but the depths of my laziness knows no bottom, and after completing the Yakuza series and Valkyria Chronicles, I settled for watching other people play games, and spent 100 hours watching Jeff and Vinny's legendary Endurance Run of Persona 4--that's not to mention beating The Last of Us four times and watching it being beaten by two YouTube personalities, spectating Evo, the biggest fighting game competition in America, and last weekend's Summer Games Done Quick, a five-day long marathon of master game players showing their stuff to raise money for Doctors Without Borders (they raised $250,000!).
After all this, I've come to realize something, something that I've actually realized long ago but didn't want to think about lest my daily life be disturbed beyond recovery. If there are no peaks or valleys, but only a straight line, how could I possibly tell the difference between fun and boring? I no longer did things for enjoyment, but rather, I did them to pass the time. There was no meaning in what I was doing. I was a zombie, consuming everything and anything, and the more I ate, the less I was satisfied. I sought constant stimulation. I wanted to lose myself in media. All of sudden, I wasn't living anymore. My life had been transplanted into the internet, jumping from one show to another, into multiple manga series, stretching out into pointless hours on a message board, and it was no longer mine to claim. I suppose you can call it an existential crisis.
I can see why people come out of retirement and return to work. People need purpose. Without it, we wander aimlessly and don't know what to do ourselves. We requires goals to motivate and propel us forward. Without dreams, what are we but unconscious? Ignorant as the world passes us by. That feeling of doing nothing, of producing nothing, fills us with only nothing. I don't expect someone who's never taken a break in their life to understand this. Perhaps it should take only a week, not months, to come to this conclusion, but I'm quite good at staving off the truth. This was an opportunity to enact the biggest act of procrastination my life has ever seen. Now that I've done it, it's time to come back, back to days where I ground my fingertips into nubs, pooling all my concentration, and allow myself just the slightest bit of creativity to liven up an otherwise droll task.
All that consumption--it can't be for nothing. There has to be a point to it, a lesson learned, a moral, a valuable skill acquired or something. Did I truly waste my time? I can't say I didn't enjoy it, and in some ways, I think it was a necessary experience in order to grow. Or, this could all just be one big attempt to paint my wasted five months in a better light. There were tons of things I could've done: like volunteer, freelance, or pursue my own personal projects. I deliberately stuck my in the sand and shunned any opportunity before me... until now.
Deep down inside, I know that this will be the last time I'll enjoy an extended vacation like this. Maybe, that's why, with all my heart, I embraced oblivion and all its forms. But that road's just a dead end, and it's finally for a change of direction.
Friday, February 15, 2013
What is Magic?
Magic is the difference between result and effort--or to put it more simply, the difference between what you see and what's been put in. Consider the hours of practice it takes for a magician to master his trick, ensuring that the audience sees it at just the right angle every single time he performs.
Any activity that can be mastered, displayed at its highest form, is liable to produce moments of magic. You can even call them "miracles." We see it all the time in sports. They're the buzzer beaters, the hole-in-ones, the comebacks, the perfect confluence of events that result in an outcome that rests squarely in the zone of statistical improbability--and yet, it still happens.
Magic isn't something extraordinary; rather, it's a function of the ordinary. Every activity, at its core, is a system of reproducible actions. It's a matter of stretching that system to its limits. To reach the highest peaks, it requires infinite amounts of practice, patience, and persistence.
If you want to create magic, imagine an accomplishment unseen, within the limits of capability, but beyond the average of effort. Sometimes, it's the small things taken to the extreme, that creates that wonderful thing we call "magic."
Any activity that can be mastered, displayed at its highest form, is liable to produce moments of magic. You can even call them "miracles." We see it all the time in sports. They're the buzzer beaters, the hole-in-ones, the comebacks, the perfect confluence of events that result in an outcome that rests squarely in the zone of statistical improbability--and yet, it still happens.
Magic isn't something extraordinary; rather, it's a function of the ordinary. Every activity, at its core, is a system of reproducible actions. It's a matter of stretching that system to its limits. To reach the highest peaks, it requires infinite amounts of practice, patience, and persistence.
If you want to create magic, imagine an accomplishment unseen, within the limits of capability, but beyond the average of effort. Sometimes, it's the small things taken to the extreme, that creates that wonderful thing we call "magic."
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