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	Five Rings
	a journal of the creative writing process


  


	 
	


 



	

	
		
  	  							
			Is it okay to offend?
				 April 8, 2008  • 4 Comments 

				
					I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not a writer should write in such a way that risks offending some of their readers. I know I’ve watched movies or read books where it seemed like the political or moral points were painfully transparent. People often say they are too preachy, trying to shove their ideals down their throats. But the secret is, almost every movie and book out there has an opinion; fiction, non-fiction, whatever - Some writers are just more skillful at disguising it with metaphor and plot than others.
Hearing opinions challenges people; forces people to think - to face things they have never faced before - to look in the mirror and finally admit “That’s me”. It’s my contention that people need to hear opinions. It is both healthy and necessary for humans to explore their opinions, state them, and try to understand why somebody else’s might differ, without losing their temper. It takes practice. Continue reading ‘Is it okay to offend?’
				
			
							
		
			
		
			
			Cartography!
				 April 2, 2008  • No Comments 

				
					
Lately, I have been writing a lot, and I came to realize the theme for my storyline is “trust”:

To truly believe in something greater than yourself, do you have to surrender to trust?
How can you trust what you see?
How can you ever trust in what you don’t see?
How far can you trust someone you think you know so well?
How much trust is needed for a relationship to work?
Giving yourself an honest look, how much can you be trusted?

My storyline attempts to analyze all of these questions and carefully explore the possible answers.
I get excited just thinking about it!
~
Also, I wanted to share a few interesting techniques I’ve read lately involving freewriting…
When you don’t know what to freewrite, it may sound crazy, but you can freewrite about ‘not being able to freewrite’.
Another thing you can do is listen to a song that brings out your emotions, then try to transpose those emotions into words.
I’ve given both techniques a try - they are great ways to break writer’s block.
~
Thirdly, I wanted to show you some of what I’ve done with my map-making endeavor so far.
Some things I’ve taken into consideration (and they helped my story make more sense, too!):1. The average person can travel on foot 10-20 miles per day - At least, they can in a culture where travelling on foot is normal.
2. A highly experienced traveller can even travel 70 miles in 24 hours, but cannot do it without feeling very exhausted afterward.
3. On horseback, a traveller can go 40 miles easily, 50 normally (with consideration for food, water, rest, etc), 60 is hard on the horse and cannot be done consecutively for long.
4. A horse-drawn wagon can travel 20 miles per day.
5. A mule-drawn wagon = Also 20 miles per day.
6. Ox-drawn wagon = 12 miles per day.
7. English Flying coaches = 100 miles per day.
8. Pony Express riders travelled up to 200 miles per day.
9. Viking Longboats could travel 100 miles per day, all other ships were slower.
For obvious reasons, it’s probably a good idea to know roughly how long it should take for your characters to traverse your map. If a horse can travel x miles in a day if it is pushed, skipping camp for y consecutive days, those are things that will come in handy for positioning cities. It wouldn’t make much sense to place a reclusive, hidden village a day’s ride away from one of the biggest cities in the world (unless it was hidden very well).
And, while not necessary, it definitely helps to know a bit about physical science and the geological time scale ~ how wind behaves ~ how volcanoes form at certain shorelines ~ or what happens after an iceberg melts.
I drew a rough map with paths that my characters travel and the miles they travelled to each destination in a spiral notebook. Then I went ahead and drew out the way I would like the main continent (tentatively called Aerthai) to look. I really wanted to get a Wacom tablet to draw the details on my map (I’m still negotiating with my better half on getting one), but I figured out a way to do it with just a mechanical pencil, a sheet of fairly heavy paper from a sketch book, and a scanner.

As an experiment, I loaded it up in Adobe Photoshop CS2 to see what kind of cool things I could do with it.
I came up with this:

Now I’m going to go back to my original map and draw in a compass, terrain features, and locations before rendering the map. I think it might turn out pretty cool! I’ll go ahead and post the entire step-by-step process next time.
Prev: Prose and Poetry | Next: Is it okay to offend?
				
			

			
		
			
			Prose & Poetry
				 March 26, 2008  • 2 Comments 

				
					*ahem* Since it’s taking longer than I thought getting around to finishing my cartography project, and since I’m falling behind on my C++ coding, and since nobody has really lambasted my writing as of yet (No news is good news?), I figured I would do something completely random (to take a rest from cursed coding).
So … I was looking at one of the paragraphs I had freewritten, and I got to thinking, “Hey! This might make a snazzy poem!”
The victim:
A warm wind resting over a bay stirred from its slumber. With a graceful certainty, it drifted across the world, offering passage to clouds … scents … seeds … sailing vessels - Suddenly, it collided with colder winds and soared into the stratosphere. Over time, it descended until, finally, it settled upon a glade. Through the countless walls of ivy and oaks, it emerged upon a field of surging wild flowers which, as they swayed like ocean tides, revealed a young girl barely as tall.
The result:
‘Nymph of the Glade’
A warm summer wind
resting over a bay
stirred from its slumber;
awakened to play;
with graceful certainty,
yet, uncertain terms,
offered passage to clouds,
scents, seeds, ships, and birds.
Sailed it, o’er the world
with no concept of time
when, colliding with cool winds,
it climbed and it climbed.
And, entering stratos;
felt it, cold and strayed
until, decades later,
fell upon a glade,
where-past towering oaks,
and beyond ivy walls,
flowers surged to reveal
a girl, barely as tall.
Being that I hadn’t written a poem in over a decade, I thought it turned out pretty good! :)
In the original paragraph, I wasn’t even writing about a dryad (wood-nymph), but … the ‘magic’ of poetry turned the girl into one, anyway.
As usual, critiques are welcomed with open arms here for both poetry and prose.
Well … I guess that means it’s time to get back to coding. And then hopefully more map-making!
prev: Inventing the rules | next: Cartography!
				
			

			
		
			
			Inventing the rules
				 March 24, 2008  • 2 Comments 

				
					If it wasn’t obvious enough from my previous post, I decided to go with a third-person perspective for my novel. Third-person seems to fit the high fantasy genre almost too well, allowing the writer to write from varying points of view, and even allowing usage of an omniscient voice if the need should ever arise. Plus, it allows the writer to portray scenarios from varying distances and degrees of emotional pitch. It is not illegal to switch into second or first-person, either (But it’s usually a bad idea to do that unless it is intrinsic to the story).
I’m sure you’ve read that audiences typically identify with the characters that populate your world on a much more intimate level than they ever could with the scenarios you create for them, but that doesn’t mean you should short-change great characters with a mediocre plot. I decided I wanted to try and create a story worthy of my characters - one that would plunge each character into the sheer heights and morbid depths of their emotions.
Masashi Kishimoto, the (then) 19 year-old creator of Naruto said in an interview that, in order to make a plot more engaging, each event must follow its own specific set of rules. If that’s the case, the characters end up having to work within those limitations coupled with their own built-in flaws, and the plot itself becomes more identifiable.
The world also has to follow such rules.
As far as I can tell, creating a world is just a declaration of different rules. The more your list grows, the more your world transforms into something tangible and organic.
When people say world building is like ‘playing God’, they aren’t kidding. If you want your people to eat flowers around a waterfall cascading from a mysterious magical pot, suspended in midair, down a gaping hole in the center of your planet, then it becomes so. For me, weilding the power of pure unbridled creation felt like unsure footing; it was hard to just declare things about my world with any certainty. But I think the trick is, you should try to make all of your rules have a sort of synergy. Each new rule must cooperate with what you’ve already declared to reinforce the atmosphere of the world you are trying to build.
Here’s a few for my world: Continue reading ‘Inventing the rules’
				
			

			
		
			
			Prior to the finer details…
				 March 22, 2008  • No Comments 

				
					This is one of the four chapters I mentioned in my previous post. I had written this before I started to iron out a decent timeline with proper motives and villains. I just thought I would post this, since it might give you a better feel for my writing style. Since most of this will be largely unchanged in the final product, critiques are definitely most welcome. (For that matter, critiques are always welcome here.)

Matar had flown long enough. He just … somehow … knew he had. He changed his wing pattern to ‘Up, Down, and Close‘. When he broke free of the clouds, he could clearly see every detail of the dense city buildings, even in the dying light. He didn’t think of it as ‘Shiira’. In his head, it was more like, ‘Lonely Circled Group with Even Layers‘.
 
~ ~ ~
 
Whenever Shanung was doing someone else’s job, he usually paced. Back and forth he went; the wood beneath his feet creaking with each step. High above the city, the wind would occasionally gust. So, to break up the monotony, he would lean against any of several support beams, stemmed from the surrounding parapets, and rap his aki pipe against the iron rail guard, making a distinct ‘dinging’ sound until the embers stirred up inside. If he timed it just right, he would get to watch the wind catch a few of the embers so they could ‘dance’, glowing and twirling over the cityscape. Peering over the edge of the tower, he noticed the Shiirati were finally flocking south in droves. Turning to Marrow, he spoke loudly in his rough, leathery voice. “I know this is boring, but you’ll need to wake up, boy.”


 Continue reading ‘Prior to the finer details…’
				
			

			
		
			
			Writing without rules
				 March 22, 2008  • 2 Comments 

				
					Once you’ve written a little bit of what you feel will be a great story, all kinds of story elements start swimming around in your head.
And with all of those little story elements swimming around in your thoughts all the time, your brain somehow starts to automatically arrange some of them into a cohesive theme.
I found questions were echoing in my head all the time, such as:
“How did Cirellio and Aeriallas even meet?”
“What business did they have in Joun?”
“What does Aydomar look like?”
“Is there a spoken accent?”
“Does this city have a monarchy?”
“A Democracy?”
“A new form of government?”
“What kind of foods do they typically eat?”
“What would be an interesting culture for this city?”
I’m happy to say none of the other characters or locations so far have been derived. They came directly from my imagination. Continue reading ‘Writing without rules’
				
			

			
		
			
			Planning a plan
				 March 18, 2008  • 2 Comments 

				
					For the first time since I was fifteen years old, I had written something!!! It had been thirteen long years, and it felt good to be back.
Reading authoritative books from cover-to-cover on stuff like writing and technique was really just a way of convincing myself I was serious about learning to write a novel. Yet, as I moved on, those very books were becoming more and more obsolete. They found themselves being pushed farther and farther away until they were clearly out of arm’s reach. In their place? Lots of novels.
After all was said and done, I felt they had served their purpose well:
1. They made published writers seem far more ‘human’ to me; their world more accessible.
2. Information on finding agents and publishers: very interesting! It would have taken me ages to learn all that stuff on my own. For example, I would have still not heard of the Writer’s Market.

 Continue reading ‘Planning a plan’
				
			

			
		
			
			A blank, white landscape
				 March 17, 2008  • No Comments 

				
					As you may recall, I knew that I wanted to write a high fantasy story about an anti-hero, a thief named Cirellio. And that’s about it.
So … where did I get ‘Cirellio’ in the first place?
Cirellio’s humble beginnings:
2:00 AM. In a cold basement. With friends of the more … geeky persuasion. All of us were wired on Mountain Dew, and we were crowded around coffee tables, seated in old folding chairs, only a little worried we would get too noisy and wake up J.J.’s mom. I needed to name the thief I had just rolled, and I was always picky about decisions like that. With everyone else impatiently waiting to get started, I had grown desperate enough to start rummaging through a pile of nearby Magic: The Gathering cards as a possible source for inspiration. An artist’s name caught my eye: CIRUELO. Derived from that name, the word ‘cirellio’ just … sounded like my rogue (pronounced - Sir-el-ee-oh).

So yeah … Cirellio was a thief I created for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I would love to tell you I created Cirellio out of thin air instead of on a character creation sheet, but, this, my friends, is truth. Poor Cirellio died that same night to a nasty spell called Melf’s Acid Arrow. But no matter what his humble beginnings were, I fell in love with his name and the persona I developed for him, which incubated over the following years in my mind (even though I wasn’t playing AD&D any more). He was my all-time favorite character, so I reclaimed him from the grave for this book.
Armed with only a name and profession, it seemed the only way for me to progress was to just swallow my pride and start writing. After all, I had nothing to lose, and if I didn’t ever write my stories, who would?
Getting ready to knock on my muse’s door for the first time in years was hard. My heart felt like it going to leap right out of my chest. Would my muse turn me away? I took a deep breath and created a text file simply called ‘book.txt’. A double-click later and I was staring at a blank white landscape which, with persistence, would soon be filled with my imagination.
Hmm … a blank, white landscape?
With that thought, I closed my eyes and visualized. I didn’t worry about deleting. I just let it flow, letting the keyboard mine the depths of my imagination. When the trance-like flow finally ended, I found I had written a total of 3,253 words! I had chills.
Later, I would find out this wonderful technique was something already well known in the writing world … called ‘freewriting’.
The opening paragraph of my freewrite looked like this:
 Continue reading ‘A blank, white landscape’
				
			

			
		
			
			Into the unknown…
				 March 15, 2008  • No Comments 

				
					So… What’s next?
Next is coming up with an idea for a ’story worth telling’.
How is that done?
Unfortunately, that’s a tough question. Books on authoring get rather abstract at this point. In fact, things don’t really get back to what I would call … a ’step-by-step’ approach again until they finally start talking about finding an agent. That’s well after your transcript is already 100% finished.
So, take a deep breath. Here is where we step into the scary unknown.
 Continue reading ‘Into the unknown…’
				
			

			
		
			
			So, you want to be a writer? -part 2-
				 March 14, 2008  • 10 Comments 

				
					Okay…
After most of my personal inner struggles were out of the way and all the dust seemed to settle, I was left with the lucid fact I wanted to write high fantasy. My goal had become ‘to complete a book I could enjoy writing and be proud of - publishers be damned!’ So I pressed onward.
Books on authoring typically claimed the next step for the aspiring writer was the tired old cliche: “Read, read, read”. Read fiction. Non-fiction. The phone book. The backs of cereal boxes. Everything.
Fair enough.
 Continue reading ‘So, you want to be a writer? -part 2-’
				
			

			
		
			
			So, you want to be a writer? -part 1-
				 March 13, 2008  • 2 Comments 

				
					I guess the first step is to declare that you do. “I want to be a writer.” There. Easy. Well … not so easy. The first thing the authors of most books about ‘becoming a professional writer’ try to do is scare you away from the very idea of becoming reclusive monsters like them, complete with horror stories of broken families, heartbreak, total ruin, nervous breakdowns, paltry incomes where they had to eat ramen every day for a month, and other frustrating situations. And if that fails to deter you, they still leave you faced with a tough, life-altering decision.
I actually decided I wanted to be a writer one day when I was mindlessly flipping through TV channels at my wife’s parent’s house. (For the record, I almost never watch TV.) But anyway, there was this interview with J.K. Rowling on. It was the day before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was going to hit the shelves. A large chunk of the world was trembling in drooly anticipation for their copies. I remember there being a … let’s call it a ’suspicious modesty’ … about her as she bounced from question to question. But the interviewer was incredibly savvy at slipping in difficult questions making them seem like innocent follow-ups using the ‘foot-in-the-door’ technique, and, before she knew it, Rowling was transported back to her past. She found herself talking about her beginnings; writing the first Harry Potter book on a typewriter in an upstairs apartment, weeks away from being evicted. About how she came up with the idea for the book randomly on a train ride one day, with just a name at the tip of her tongue: “Harry”, and a vague idea that he would attend some kind of magic school. About how the rest of the story came with a lot of hard work and conviction. It was amazing. Then, I found myself wondering how many times I had dismissed my own ‘Harry’ ideas. And, most importantly, I remember thinking, “If she can do it, why can’t I?”.
But then a Deathly follow-up question creeped up on me. And it was: “What do -I- have to offer to the world of literature?”
 Continue reading ‘So, you want to be a writer? -part 1-’
				
			

			
		
			
			There is a point to all of this…
				 March 13, 2008  • 3 Comments 

				
					When I was little, I used to read and write. Not in the sense of “I could read and I could write”, but more along the lines of “I did read books on a regular basis and wrote original stories, too”. I remember reading serial detective novels all the time, and trying to tackle The Collected Works of Sherlock Holmes when I was eight (but found it was too complicated). I remember getting lots of free pizza through the Book-It! program. I remember actually thumbing though the dictionary and thesaurus during breaks in second grade. I remember being able to type quickly without looking at the keyboard by the middle of third grade, and typing rather complicated multi-page stories by the time I was ten years old on Word Perfect in DOS 3.1. I remember the first time I got a return of zero mistakes on a spell check. I remember researching Greek and Roman mythology in dusty old encyclopedias with tannish-brown stains all over them. I even managed to get a poem into a minor publication for young authors by fourth grade, and the town newspaper also printed it.
But, somewhere along the line, I decided video games, anime, music, comic books, and movies were better ways to spend my time. I became convinced that books were plagued with long-winded explanations that never seemed to get to the point.
Maybe it was hormonal.
 Continue reading ‘There is a point to all of this…’
				
			

			
		
			
			Middling
				 March 12, 2008  • 2 Comments 

				
					I am currently in the middle of writing a book. Or ‘middling’ - as it is sometimes called in the writing world. This is the point of the book writing process where you see a nightmarish landscape of jagged, foreboding mountains laid out before you during a swirling storm, and you must traverse all of it if you ever wish to see, somewhere on the horizon, the fabled, glimmering, heavenly, yet taunting, End of the Book. This is the point where you realise you will indeed pay with your sweat, blood, and tears - just like all of those authors whose advice you read forewarned - before finally making it to the end of the story, only to be greeted by an unforgiving ‘final editing process ogre’ holding his stopwatch and tapping his massive foot, demanding even more of your time and patience.
 Continue reading ‘Middling’
				
			

		
	
	
			
		
		
	

	

	
	
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	Archives		April 2008
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		Recent Posts			Is it okay to offend? 
						Cartography! 
						Prose & Poetry 
						Inventing the rules 
						Prior to the finer details… 
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