A few thoughts on the creation of story.

Thanks to the encouragement of my wife, I’ve decided to give a shot at this year’s NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month) and write a novel.

When I first started, I had  no idea what the story was going to be about, and for the first two days, I tried to force a story that  just didn’t want to be told. It was like pulling teeth; I could get the story to come out, but it felt forced, and read tht way as well. After only two days, I was already losing the hope that I could write a novel.

And then I was  struck by inspiration.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t tell a story, but rather that I was trying to tell the wrong story. I took a step back and looked at story I had written, and then immediately threw it in the trash.

Then I looked at the shorts stories I had started, and in particular the one that absolutely fascinated me–and had already rewritten the small portion I’d done three times. Now this was a story that wanted to be told, so I instead made this the focus of my novel.

The words began to flow, and I can already see where this story might go. My experience with this got me to thinking about writing on the whole. Whether it’s an essay, poem, short story, novel, biography, or whatever, I think that every piece of writing  has the same underlying issue: trying to figure out what story you need to tell.

It isn’t that some form of writing is too difficult for anyone, or that any given person can’t write a story. It’s that they’re trying to force a story instead of taking the time to find the right story.

Writing isn’t supposed to be difficult, it’s supposed to be fun, and finding the right story can help show that.

Roleplaying and methodology.

I am a fan of MMORPGs, and RPGs in general.

In particular, I love roleplaying as this is a fascinating–and interactive–form of telling a story. The process involved with getting into a character’s psyche–what factors motivate them, why they make the decisions they do. Often, I spend as much time dissecting the characters I RP as I do RPing them.

A friend of mine once referred to my style as “method roleplaying,” and I find this to be a very apt description. Method actors often talk about “becoming” the characters they portray; they sometimes spend hours studying the most minute (as in attentive to the slightest detail) parts of their character’s lives.

Some have said that method acting has revolutionized theatre in America, so why couldn’t it be applied to writing or roleplaying?

The memorable characters are the more fleshed out ones: those who we wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see having a cup of coffee at the local diner, for example. That’s why we associate with them. They could be real people, and in the stories where they appear, they are real.

It’s the same with the characters we create for RP. In the game we portray them in, they’re real people with their own thoughts, needs, wants, and desires. Some of us like to treat them as such, and for me, it makes for a much better story.

I had a lot more to  say on this but I find that the words have left me. I’ll talk about this again later.

The opening scene.

“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man.”

These are the opening lines to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella Notes From the Underground and are considered in many literary circles to be among the greatest opening lines of any novel. I happen to agree with this assessment. If  you haven’t read it before, I highly suggest you do; it’s not an easy read, as the tone and theme are very dark, but if you have patience and an open mind, you will be rewarded.

It’s not so much a novella as it is the plea and treatise of a madman, and that’s what makes for a compelling story: you have a completely unreliable narrator dictating his view of a cruel and uncaring world.

If it tells you anything, I was first introduced to this text in a psychology class.

Those words can also describe me. I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I have multiple sclerosis, so I am definitely a sick man.

However that’s where my similarities with Dostoyevsky’s narrator, commonly called the Underground Man, thankfully ends. I may be a spiteful man, but I’m also a man with interests, and it is because of these that this blog originated. In particular, my love of stories. I love how stories form and flow, how a good one affects us, and stays with us.

Here, I plan to talk about stories: ones which I’ll write myself, those of my friends, and even those of more accoplished writers. I’ll talk about theory, and different ways to read stories. And I plan to write about other things which interest me.