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Logos, Labels, and Lego – 15 Questions with Artist and Illustrator, Matthew LaFleur

March 24, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

Confession time: I’ve always irrationally loved logos. I stare at and analyze them, wondering why certain geometric decisions were made, debating how much thought and effort and money went into the design. My inner wizard knows that there is latent power in an energetic swoosh, or a colored jumble of Catull letters, or a piece of fruit with a bite taken out of it. A logo is a microcosm; all the people, all the knowledge, the entire identity of a company or brand squished and squeezed and condensed down into its most simply recognizable form.

I first ran into Matt(hew) LaFleur on Twitter, one lazy Thursday evening during #beerchat. His handle, @DoodleMatt, caught my eye first, but his unique drawings quickly pulled my gaze another direction. I’m a decidedly terrible illustrator despite years of mid-meeting practice, and I’m always enamored by the skill of people who can create beautiful things with little more than paper, pens, pencils, and patience.

I followed Matt’s doodle blog for a while, not-so-secretly admiring his work. After seeing Matt’s unique takes on classic movie monsters, the clever whimsy of his Western-inspired sea creatures, and discovering that he designs and draws labels for his homebrew, I knew he was the right person to ask to design a new logo for Literature and Libation.

Slight issue: I have no idea how to design a logo. When Matt asked me what I was looking for, all I could say was, “I like antiques” which is about as helpful as saying “I like turtles.” I knew I wanted something but had no specifics about the some and only vague ideas as to the thing.

Fortunately Matt is wildly more professional that I am, and after a few emails back and forth he suggested I send him some photographs of the elements I had in mind.

This is what I sent:

A ruined archway in Cashel, Ireland; A-style mandolin blueprints; the inside of an old pocket watch

Apparently (amazingly) this was enough to give Matt some ideas, and he quickly came back to me with a sketch of his design concept:

When I saw this for the first time, hanging out mid-conversation in my Gmail, I was convinced that Matt had somehow reached into the squishiest parts of my brain and pulled out exactly what I had been unable to find in my own mind. His superpowers affirmed, I signed off on the final, and here it is now in all its glory, making my corner of the internet look oh so much better.

Old and New

I didn’t want our exchange to end there, so I decided to get to know Matt a little better using my preferred method: asking silly questions.

1. I’ve already quasi-introduced you, but can you tell us a little bit about your artistic background?

I cannot remember a time that I wasn’t drawing. I was a child of the eighties, so I drew many, many pictures of Pac-Man and ghost war zones. I thought Garfield was hilarious (hey, I was young and stupid) and I used to trace and then draw the namesake, and Odie, all of the time. It wasn’t until a kid moved into the house across the street and introduced me to comic books that I saw what illustration really was. But most of my art was funny, character-driven stuff. I went to Syracuse University and received a BFA in Illustration. Their illustration program, as well as their basketball team, are incredible.

2. When someone commissions a piece from you, how you go about conceptualizing/capturing what the client wants?

It depends on the type and delivery method of the finished illustration. Sometimes I’m told pretty much exactly what to draw. Other times I’m let loose. It takes a boatload of research, first of all. Lots of sketching. Adding a bunch of stuff to the art, then stripping a bunch of stuff away. In the end, it’s a gut thing, with a healthy does of letting the pencil go where it wants to go. How’s that for ambiguous?

3. What design software do you love to hate, or hate to love?

I love to hate Adobe Illustrator. I know, ironic, right? I just can’t stand coloring by shapes, gradients. For me, there’s no spontaneity. I’ve seen amazing work in AI, but I can’t swing it. Someone says “Can you provide an AI or EPS file?” and I break out in hives.

4. You draw label art for your homebrew, and designed a label for Middle Brow Beer; any plans to design for other breweries?

Soon, Arcade Brewery here in Chicago will release their first public brew, a scotch ale. They had a naming contest on Facebook, and the winner came up with “William Wallace Wrestle Fest.” Part two was a contest to design the label art. At the 11th hour I had an idea, submitted it, and was named a finalist. I won, up against 3 other sweet submissions. I’ve gotten to know the Arcade guys pretty well, and I’m anxious to see these beers on the shelves. There are a couple other things in the works. One is still up for grabs, so I’m waiting if I get the call. It will involve a huge museum, a big illinois brewery, and a giant among Chicago chefs. Fingers crossed.

Not a label, but another was a tshirt design for a collaboration of Burgers and Beers from Chicago mainstays Kuma’s Corner (burgers), DryHop Brewers (beers), and the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild. They wanted artwork that incorporated the logos of all three. We came with the idea of a giant bear rampaging through downtown Chicago… hard to pass that up.

5. If you could redesign the label of any commercial beer out there, what would you pick?

I have illustrated many labels for my homebrew, as well as a couple commercial ones. I know how hard it is to come up a label design, but I haven’t had to think too much about the face of a long line of bottles at a store. While there have been more than a few that I personally didn’t like, you have to admit that they sometimes really stand out on a shelf. Like the beer inside, the art outside is a subjective thing. Not everybody is going to dig it. But the brewery loves it.

6. Are there any surprising limitations (other than size) when designing bottle labels?

The curvature of the bottle was something I didn’t account for when designing and illustrating labels. The art has to be visible without someone having to rotate the bottle.

7. Who is your favorite Disney Princess, and why?

Ooh, you go right for the jugular, Oliver. Can I say Jessica Rabbit? I really like the recent heroines: Merida from Brave, Anna & Elsa from Frozen, even Rapunzel. Tough and flawed. Old school princess fave would have to be Belle. Smart, unselfish, and ready to fight wolves. Goes toe to toe with giant, angry beast thing. Brunette.

8. If I came over to your house on an average Saturday afternoon, what would you be doing?

Well, I probably wouldn’t be there. I’d be at my eldest daughter’s cello group class. Truth. Juggling a 9 to 5, freelance illustration, and family is something I’m still trying to figure out. If I wasn’t at the class, I might be at the drafting table, with my two daughters in the room doing crafts, drawing, or coloring one of my black and white illustrations in Photoshop.

9. If your life – as it is right now – was turned into a LEGO set, what would it look like?

It would probably be the lamest LEGO set ever.

LaFleur Minifigs sold separately.

10. If you developed a weird, selective allergy and were only allowed to drink one style of beer for the rest of your life, what style would you pick?

As trite as it may sound, I’d have to go with IPA. Session, imperial, double, black, rye, Belgo, I’ll take ’em all. November rolls around and I’m ready for stouts and heavier stuff, but then the February sun comes up and I’m enjoying IPAs. Once you get hooked on them, everything else pales (see what I did there?)

11. Mac or PC or Linux or something else I’m not aware of?

Mac. Since 1992.

12. How do you feel about No.2 Pencils?

Dark enough to make a good mark, hard enough to keep a decent point for a good 5-7 minutes. Good for testing. I prefer a softer, darker lead, though.

13. What’s the oddest thing anyone has ever asked you to draw?

“What I’m looking to do, is have [an old timey] bike being towed with a rope by a boy with a deer skull head.” I really liked how this piece turned out, but I was really clueless about how it was going to look.

14. What is the answer to life the universe and everything?

42.

Did I win?

Seriously, do something that truly makes you happy, and do it forever. If you love what you do, then you’ll never have to work a day in your life. Money is great. Happiness can’t be bought.

15. Where can everyone find you and your work?

Thank you so much for this opportunity to talk about something I love to talk about. Myself! No, I mean making art for a living. You can find me all over the iPlace. If there’s a social media, I’m there. Instagram. Twitter. Facebook. Pinterest (great for research and inspiration). My website is lafleurillustration.com. I also have an infrequently updated doodle blog.

Craft and Draft: I’ll take words that start with “Ad” for $2000, Alex

February 1, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Warning, this post contains explicit grammar that may not be appropriate for people who don’t like grammar. Words like participle and infinitive and adjectival will be used. Parental discretion is advised.

As a culture, we’re rapidly approaching critical mass of “stuff we need to remember.” Kick-off times, meeting times, departure times, closing times. Passwords, PINs, SSNs, and IPs. Some of us have to remember large, complicated matrices and formulas and numbers, others large, complicated designs and abstracts and ideas. We have to remember how our systems work, both technical and physical, where Microsoft decided to hide the “sort ascending button” in this version, who asked who out for beers, and that in order to cook dinner, the oven needs to be hot, and for it to be hot, it needs to be preheated.

There are so many pieces of information to store, catalog, and recall that it’s amazing our brains have time for anything else.

As a result of this constant data-bombardment we inevitably forget things that aren’t important to our daily survival. Things like the specifics of molecular structure or which side of the plate the salad fork goes on or to finally water that poor house plant in the corner of our bedroom. Our brains work like massive databases where the most relevant, frequently accessed, and important information is kept at the ready, while everything else is crammed and stuffed into parts of the brain that aren’t frequently visited. You haven’t completely forgotten the stuff down in the dusty tomes of your archive, but it takes some effort and a big Swiffer Duster to bring it back up to the light of your main study.

That’s where your grammar lives. Unless you’re a ferocious copy editor or the reincarnation of E.B. White, chances are your understanding of grammatical rules has sunk deeper than the Titanic.

That’s OK. I’m here to raise the wreck and help figure all this “grammar” stuff out.

“Ad” Words

I’ve read a lot of contemporary writing advice and the general consensus seems to be, “don’t use adverbs or adjectives unless you really need to.”

In a literary vacuum this is good advice. Don’t write “He walked aimlessly” when you could write “He sauntered.” A good verb will almost always trump a bad verb with an glued-on adverb trying to pick up the syntactic slack.

But to avoid using adverbs and adjectives at all would lead to peculiar if not nigh unreadable language. You could avoid using single world adverbs and adjectives for a while, but to give no description to any of your nouns or any of your verbs seems masochistic for the reader and sadistic for the writer.

The explanation is simple: don’t rely on single words, use phrases. A phrase is a group of words that can stand for a single part of speech. For example, “He ran up the bank of the river.” The simple sentence is, “He ran.” But that sentence is boring and non-specific and no one wants to read it. Enter the adverbial phrase, “up the bank of the river.” Now we know where he ran. That whole string of words equals a single adverbial phrase (it’s also a prepositional phrase, but we’ll ignore that for now).

Of course, you can overuse phrases just like you can overuse single words and turn your prose into an insipid nightmare of nothing but pointless, unwavering description. But let’s pretend you won’t do that because you know better. Please don’t do that. It hurts our brains.

An important thing to remember about a phrase is that it does not contain a subject and predicate, meaning it isn’t a sentence or a clause. “Under the waves” is a phrase because it clearly doesn’t have a subject or predicate (or verb for that matter), it only functions to describe where, in some other, imaginary sentence.

There are two types of phrases: prepositional phrases (which, to everyone’s alarm, contain prepositions) and verbal phrases (which in turn has three sub-forms: infinitives, past participles, and present participles.) For now, we’ll just focus on how to identify and use the larger concepts of adverbial and adjectival phrases, regardless of their status as prepositions or verbals.

To help you understand how adverbial and adjectival phrases work, I’ve called on my friends: “Adjectival Arwen” and “Adverbial Aragorn.”

They are currently in post production of “Lord of the Ings: Two Gerunds”, slated for a 2027 release.

Adjectival Arwen rides towards Rivendell in a saddle made of soft leather

As a refresher (no one is judging anyone here) an adjective is a word (or series of words) that describes a noun. The word “Adjectival” in Arwen’s name is itself an adjective (I’m so meta). You know these words and use them all the time: drunken, sharp, red, gooey, awkward, etc. They add specificity to the noun, so the reader knows exactly which subject the writer meant. You could say “the man” which could mean any random dude, or you could say, “the man with the giant purple mustache” which pretty much points directly to a specific, crazy guy.

Adjectives give nouns unique identity. Arwen is not just an elf. She is a pretty elf who wields Hadhafang, sword of the Elven queens. Adjectives!

We use adjectival phrases all the time without really thinking about it. Any time you try to describe your subject, you’re using an adjectival phrase. It can be as simple as describing the look of something, “Arwen dyed her flowing hair bright red” (she didn’t just dye her hair, she dyed it a specific color) or as complicated as an appositive, which completely renames the noun, “Arwen, only daughter of Elrond of Rivendell, rode out to meet the battle.”

The key thing to remember her is that adjectival phrases always reference a noun. If something is describing the verb, or explaining how/where/when/why the action happened, it can’t be an adjectival phrase.

Adverbial Aragorn fights the orcs valiantly

Adverbs are the beasts that labor in the fields of our language, doing most of the heavy lifting and manual labor. They are words or phrases that describe verbs. These are often the “-ly” forms of adjectives (drunkenly, hazily) but can come in many other flavors.

An adverbial phrase always describes a verb in the sentence. If “Aragorn swings Narsil with the might of his Dúnedain ancestors,” the adverbial phrase (“with the might of”) describes the way he swings. It emphasizes and explains the action of the verb, giving sentence some spice, and clarifying just how the action took place. That adverbial phrase also contains a secondary adjectival phrase that describes what kind of might he was swinging with. Sweet.

All of this stuff builds on itself. Look at the basic sentence first, “Aragorn swings Narsil” then the adverbial “with the might” then the adjectival “of his Dúnedain ancestors.” It’s like a Russian doll of phrases, all of which eventually gives you a sentence that describes multiple things in specific ways.

So, adjectival phrases modify nouns, adverbial phrases modify verbs. All pretty simple, right? You’ll be able to use these left and right, with purpose, to make your writing all awesome now, right?

Right?

If you’re confused, that’s OK. Sentence variation in English is damn near infinite. You can and will have adjectival phrases inside of adverbial phrases that are part of compound predicates with multiple verbs that may or may not be prepositional. They may be part of a direct object or a subject compliment or just a tulle dress that you put on your subject to make it fancier so it will get more attention during its debutante ball. The great part about understanding these rules is that you can intentionally play with them and have fun with your writing, which, with practice, eventually becomes a part of your style and voice.

I know I’ve dumped a lot of ideas on you and presented a lot of unqualified terms. If anyone has any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

I’ll cover more next week. These guy may pay a visit:

For the record, this is The Pirate of Prepositions, The Appositive Adventurer, and The Clause Clown. They mean business.

Craft and Draft: Grammar (with an “a”, not an “e”)

January 25, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

I am taking a graduate level grammar class this semester. I apologize and you have been forewarned.

Grammar is an under-appreciated beast. It seems an inborn relationship, that of writing needing grammar, but very few people truly understand why the two are symbiotic. It’s the Adobe Illustrator of the writing world; everyone knows it can do great things, but very few bother to learn how it really works beyond the very basics. Many people assume they know enough about grammar to get by.

It is equal parts adored and reviled. Non-grammar people love to hate it, and grammar enthusiasts love to hate people who misuse it. It is more often than not misunderstood and almost always misrepresented by misguided, albeit well-meaning supporters.

Grammar carries on its back a latent fear, the summation of all of those painful elementary school lessons that you never quite learned and definitely don’t remember now. It causes unwanted mental disruptions in even the best language handlers. It vexes young editors and senior writers alike. It reminds a lot of word-people that their grasp on this whole “English” thing is more slippery and tentative than they care to admit.

There is nothing to fear about grammar. It is (when its guts are dissected and carefully examined) the math of language. The formulas and order of operations that keeps everything in line. It dictates how and when we can use certain patterns, and gives us a standard to mold our writing around.

If the goal of writing is to convey a message, grammar is the vehicle the message drives. It is the jeep that tumbles over the rocky terrain of complex ideas. Without grammar, writing would be an incoherent jumble of words, out of order, misspelled, with no rules governing how to decode and understand the message.

Without canon grammar, we’d all spell and write (and sound) like Chaucer.

Nobody wants that.

So, why do you need to understand grammar? Why should you care if your language is passive or you’ve split tons of infinitives or overused conjunctions in a sentence like I did in this one?

To oversimplify: clarity.

My wife has a motto, “Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can.”

If you can’t clearly present your idea or argument because of muddled grammar, what’s the point of writing it down and sharing it with the world?

1. Grammar is your friend, not your enemy

I really dislike the term “Grammar Nazi.” Not only does it apply all sorts of unnecessary (and frankly tasteless) connotations, it also perpetuates a culture where the only way to fix bad grammar is to ridicule and demonize it. Nazis wanted to create a perfect master race. Grammarians just want people to be accurate. Big, not-so-subtle difference.

If we’re forced by some weird societal zeitgeist to have a catchphrase for grammar-sticklers, I’d prefer “Grammar Ninja.” Instead of loudly declaring your hatred of poor grammar while wearing large boots and screaming at people to correct that use of “their” to “they’re”, sneak in under shadow and assassinate the bad grammar. Move like ink from the tip of a pen, flow through the errors, slice out mistakes. A good editor/writer will seamlessly, stealthily, efficiently correct grammar without making a big show of it, all ninja-like.

Comma splice? More like comma slice! Puns are great.

Comma splice? More like comma slice! Oh man, puns are great.

Godwinning grammarians makes grammar seem mean and harsh and evil. Grammar is anything but. It is there to help you organize your thoughts and be as articulate as possible. It is that really well qualified buddy who wants to help you with that start-up company, if you’d just stop ignoring all of his calls.

You wouldn’t yell at your wrench for not being able to loosen a bolt. You’d yell at the bolt, or your pathetic upper body strength, or the person who tightened the bolt in the first place. So why be mad at grammar for your poor sentences? Figure out what went wrong and why, and fix it.

Any sinking sentence can be repaired with the proper application of grammar. Remember that the next time you get mad at someone for using a possessive apostrophe to pluralize a word. Help and use the grammar, don’t shun and hate the grammar.

2. Grammar is a toolbox, not a single tool

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that almost anything in life can be explained by drawing parallels to Lego, especially writing, editing, and other literary endeavors.

The word “grammar” is not just an abstract, but also a collective noun. It stands for all of a writer’s tools: tense-wrenches and structure-screwdrivers, appositive-augers and subordinate-saws.

Just like the word “Lego” is a catch-all for the blocks and fasteners and mini-figures. You have 2×2 blocks and 3×1 blocks and those weird “L” shaped blocks, and little men with swords and helmets that make up the abstract concept of Lego.

You could just stick the blocks together however so struck your fancy at the time, and I’m sure people would recognize it as something built out of Lego. But to turn those little plastic blocks into something that other people want to look at and in turn appreciate, you have to follow the rules in the instruction pamphlet.

Grammar is the same way. You can loosely throw around constructs and still get some vague message across, but if you want your readers to understand your point and have a meaningful reaction, you have to be as clear as possible. Being clear means acknowledging the rules set forth by contemporary grammarians and reading lots of Strunk and White. Any misplaced subjects or confusing adjectival phrases or malapropisms will distract your reader from your message.

Top vs. Bottom: The difference between, “This a tree.” and “This is a brown and green tree, made of Lego.”

You wouldn’t use a screwdriver to hammer a nail (even though it could work), so you shouldn’t use weak adverbs where a strong verb could do a better job. Good grammar (and good writing) comes down to the best application of the best tool in the right circumstance.

Figure out which tools are already in your grammatical toolbox, and which ones you still need to acquire Learn what each tool does and how it can be best applied to strengthen your writing.

When you’ve mastered your tools, your message can’t help but be clear.

3. To break the rules you have to know the rules

I’ve never been a big fan of rules. Rules by their nature are restrictive, and I don’t like anyone or anything to tell me what I can and can’t do, as a general life philosophy.

I do however appreciate why rules exist. Rules are for the people who don’t quite get it yet, and serve as a universal basis that everyone can understand and work from. It is good to have rules, so that anyone can fall back on them and say, “well yes, I guess that works, but the rules say to do it this way” should there ever be any confusion.

But, as the cliche goes, “rules are made to be broken.” Most creativity would be stifled if it were forced to always follow a set of guidelines, so the very act of creating something new often defies an existing rule set. In order to be fresh and innovative, you’re going to have to smash down some rule-walls and tell the standards police to shove it up their textbooks.

With that comes certain responsibility. A responsibility to understand what rules you are breaking, and why breaking them is a good thing. The only reason to ever break a grammatical rule is for style, effect, or voice. If you’re breaking a rule for another reason, chances are you don’t understand the rule in the first place.

The only way to effectively play with grammar is to first make grammar your bitch.

Ever wonder how really rich dudes and corporations get away with not paying a huge amount in taxes? It’s because they (or the people they employ) know the tax rules better than they know their own children. They know just how far they can bend a rule without breaking it. Just how much of the gross income can be claimed as international revenue. Just how many legal donations will lead to huge tax write-offs.

If you want to bend (or even break) the grammatical rules, you first have to study a lot of grammar. Not just the basic stuff you learned in school, but complex grammar including usage, phrasing, colloquialism, etc.

If you try to break the rules without really knowing the rules, people will notice. You might break the rules too much, or too little, or in a way that doesn’t make sense which will make your writing look sloppy and unprofessional.

And most importantly, if you’re going to break any rules, make sure you’re doing it for a reason that will support your voice, theme, or message.

Breaking them for the sake of breaking them, just because you don’t like them and want to see them in pain, is no way to go through your writing life.

I made "Gangsta Gandalf" because I know and have studied the rules of LOTR for years.

I broke the rules and made “Gangsta Gandalf” because I know and have studied the rules of LOTR for years.

Craft and Draft: Fixing What Ain’t Not Broke

October 19, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

You’re belly button-deep in a manuscript that has taken over your soul and filled you with a writing fervor so intense that you haven’t eaten or gone to the bathroom in 18 hours. Everything is going amazingly well; the characters are organic and their motivations are varied, believable, even human at times. Your narrative arc is building tension exactly like you imagined, and that dramatic climax you’ve got tucked so deftly up your sleeve is about to drop with an impact that could be measured in megatons. You got this writing thing down.

And then you give your manuscript to a friend/editor/someone you’ve strapped to a chair and forced to read your work.

Their feedback isn’t the glowing awesomeness you expected from such a genre-altering, life-changing, world-healing piece of writing. They found plot problems. Big ones. Characters who seemed flat or underdeveloped. They even found some language that just straight up didn’t make sense.

How dare they question your art!? You are the master of this story, a demi-god of the world your brain manifested and turned into many many pages of words. This lowly reviewer just doesn’t get it. You stomp around like a child in snow boots, cursing their name and reminding yourself how awesome you are with impromptu bathroom mirror pep-talks.

After some time away from your story, you sit down and read it yourself. Suddenly all of those mistakes our reviewer pointed out are pretty damn obvious

Oooooops.

How do you fix it (and apologize to your editor for your tanturm)?

1. Admit you have some issues

Not personally. I don’t care if you’ve got a coke habit for your coke habit. I’m talking about writing issues here.

Some of your characters may not be working very well. Hell, your main character may not be working very well. Before you can fix anything, you have to accept that your first draft will have flaws. And they may be major. And there may be a lot of them. And it may require a shit load of editing and rewriting to fix.

That’s OK. The first step is acknowledging you have a problem. It can be really hard to separate your emotions from something you have worked so hard on, but 999,999 times out of 1,000,000 you won’t get it perfect the first time around. There is absolutely no shame in revising. There is a lot more work, but no shame.

Even famous authors face these issues. Erik Larson (author of multiple national bestsellers like Isaac’s Storm and Devil in the White City) nearly didn’t use Isaac as the protagonist of his book because he felt he was “uni-dimensional.” This is after (what I assume, citation needed) hundreds upon hundreds of hours of research about Isaac, his life, and the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Sometimes you have to make hard choices for what is best for your writing, even if it means throwing away countless amounts of hard work.

It’s not fun and it’s not easy, but sometimes, you just gotta take one for the story.

Remember when I asked if I could borrow your speeder? Well, I had a little accident. There was an Ewok and a tree and some rebel scum; long story. Anyway, I swear it’s not as bad as it looks.

2. Reduce, reuse, recycle

A lot of writing problems come from the desire to be super-duper complex, as if that will somehow make everything instantly more compelling and multidimensional. While, yes, tossing a running chainsaw to a juggler already keeping an angry ocelot and a canister of tear gas in the air would certainly be entertaining, it definitely opens him up to a much bigger margin of error.

Troublesome and unclear plot points can be resolved by removing or reducing the number of conflicts. Sometimes this means removing a character from a scene entirely, or removing a scene that you thought was a moment of pure genius. You may have just made to many allusions to outside works or other parts of your own work that make an entire section lose its edge.

Brevity is the soul of wit, but also makes for crisp, coherent writing.

When you reread one of your major plot-moving scenes, stop yourself anywhere you start thinking about another point in the story or something else entirely. Chances are, if the section can’t hold your attention, it will also send your readers off on a mental tangent, and even possibly cause them to stop reading.

Unless you’ve got a lot of practice under your belt, don’t try to over complicate things. Simple characters with clearly defined motivations in well described, relevant settings will always be more interesting to read than crazy shit that is just in there to crazify other shit.

If your ultimate goal is publicly readability, these are the choices (and possibly sacrifices) you have to make. Remember, just because you remove something, doesn’t mean you can’t add it back in later, or rewrite it and use it somewhere else in the story, or at the very, very least use it in another story.

Writing is awesome like that.

No, dude, I’m sure. You totally don’t need that piece. It’s for decoration or something. Listen, trust me, I saw a video of how to do this on Youtube.

3. Bust out the tools

If you aren’t going to get it right on the first try, you probably also won’t get it right on the second. Or third. Or fifteenth.

OK, you might have it right by then, but revising is definitely not a one-and-done process. It’s a lot more like whittling; you slowly shave away layers and carve out details until the perfect look and design appears where a hunk of plain ‘ole wood sat before.

Spend some time revising character, then move to dialogue. When that seems a little better, move on to scene, setting, and contextual detail. Revise the exposition along with the action. Slowly but surely, the themes of the piece will stick out their little, poignant heads, and your stylistic voice will yell at them to come play in the sun.

But you’ve got to put in the work. If editing something of length seems daunting, try splitting it into chapters, acts, or some other more digestible chunks. Writing programs like Scrivener work really, really well for this, but if technology just ain’t ‘cho thang, printing it out and making little piles works just as well.

If you’ve got a short form piece (let’s say, sub-5000 words) just suck it up and edit the damn thing. It isn’t going to magically get better the longer it sits on your hard drive. The sooner you get your mind-wrench on the literary nuts and bolts of the story, the sooner it will be super-mega-awesome and the sooner random people will want to pay you tens upon tens of dollars for it.

OK, I admit: this might not be right. But! All of the pieces are technically attached. I’m definitely putting these hours down on my timesheet.

4. Get perspective

Unless you spend some time away from your writing, you’ll never see your own mistakes. Forest for the trees, or whatever.

When you’re at a natural stopping point (read: you’ve exhausted your entire reserve of mental energy and would barf if you tried to drink another cup of coffee) put the piece away for a while. Save it to a folder that’s a couple of folders deep. Print it out and stick it under your couch. Whatever you need to do to get some creative distance from the thing.

I’ve done this countless times for homework assignments, blog posts, personal essays, and yes, even full length novel/novellas. You’ll be amazed what a little bit of down time can do for your worldview on things. Specific things you just couldn’t live without in an earlier draft will suddenly seem trivial. Other weird, half-developed ideas will suddenly become subplots or great cultural commentary that you missed or ignored the first time around.

Step away from the computer. Go do some chores or play some video games or take a trip to the ruins of Pompei. Your writing will thank you (and be better) for it.

Yea, OK, No. It doesn’t look any better from up here. In fact, I think it looks worse. Let’s look at it from way over there, far far away from this mangled wreckage.

Step 5: Rinse, repeat

This isn’t really a step, it’s just a reminder to redo all the other steps once you think you’re done with them. This process may seem tedious at first glance, but as a personal favor to me (and your Right-Brain), try it at least once.

If your writing doesn’t look, sound, and feel better from a round of acceptance, reduction, perspective, and editing, then I’ll buy you a beer.

Hey, let’s not tell Lord Vader about this whole “I crashed a really expensive speeder that I wasn’t supposed to be riding in the first place” thing. I feel like he’d overreact and get all ” force-choke-a-stormtrooper” on us.

Craft and Draft: The Proof is in the Reading

August 30, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Guys and gals, I have one of those things to make.

A concession? A regression? A Congressional appeal?

No, no. A confession. Yes. Confess, sins, all that.

I am a bad proofreader. Note that I didn’t say that I am bad at proofreading. I’ve spent far too many hours studying language, grammar, syntax, and abusing the “format painter” in MS Word to be lacking the requisite skills. My badness comes from my impulsive heart, not my literary brain.

When it comes to proofreading, I don’t apply consistent attention or emphasis. Often I’ll be so happy with myself that I finished something, that I think one quick read-through is enough before I put my greedy little mouse cursor all over the “publish” button. Other times I’m overly confident in my ability to translate thought to finger movement to letters to sentences. I couldn’t possibly have made a mistake, I typed everything so deliberately.

But low and bend and behold and be humble; almost all of my posts appear on the internetz with typos. Errors. Poorly placed prepositional phrases. Sometimes even gross homonymic misspellings. For that, I apologize.

I should have no excuse (but of course I do). Proofreading is at least half of what I do to pay the bills. I am personally responsible for making sure important things like status reports and new-work proposals look and sound good.

When so much is on the line, how dare I let a passive construct through on my turn to stand guard? Who do I think I am?

It has nothing to do with attention to detail, fatigue, or how boring the particular thing you’re proofreading is. Through a highly thorough, empirical scientific process, I have discovered that the reason that I (and everyone who struggles with this) am a bad proofreader, is because there are anti-proofreading goblins living inside of my brain.

And their will is bent on making me miss shit that should otherwise not be missed.

They’re like the three stooges of making you look bad/feel stupid.

The goblins never stop. They will crawl around just behind your eyes, making sure you skip over that incorrect possessive apostrophe, and right when you’re about to see that “a” before a vowel that should be an “an” they’ll poke the distraction center of your brain with a #2 pencil.

But don’t feel bad. Even the President of the United States is afflicted with APF goblins.

The first step to fighting them is to accept them. Don’t beat yourself up over mistakes in proofreading. You tried, it’s not really your fault.

But when you do make a mistake. Learn from it. Remember where the goblins like to mess you up, when, and why. Eventually, you’ll be onto their game, and they will have a harder and harder time tripping you up.

Make sure you do you best to proofread everything. Emails, YouTube comments, Fark.com thread posts, anything. The more you proofread, the more the goblins have to work. Eventually you’ll tire them little bastards out.

Poor little dude is pooped.

A few other helpful tricks to keep the goblins on their toes:

-Proofread out loud. Somehow the process of using three different parts of your brain by reading, saying, and then hearing what you’re reading can really help catch hidden mistakes. This is also great for improving the cadence and readability of your work, which the goblins just hate.

-If you’re struggling with line-by-line edits, read your piece backwards. I know, it sounds odd. But read each word individually from end to start, and you can review it as a standalone word, not part of the piece. Your brain tricks you into filling in blanks when you proofread because you know what it is supposed to say. Reading backwards confuses the shit out of the goblins.

-Have someone else read your work. I know, you are awesome, and clearly don’t need any outside help. But think of the goblins. Other people have different types of goblins and sometimes their goblins won’t see what your goblins did. And vice versa.

-Study. This may seem tedious, but really, do it. Get your hands on Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Walsh’s Lapsing into a Comma, Truss’s Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, and O’Conner’s Woe is I. Reading about grammar and style may seem boring, but if you’re a writer (or deign to call yourself one), it is a necessary evil. Grammar is the math of writing.

-Be deliberate when you proofread. Proofread with a vengeance! Make it mean something to your writing. It is so easy to just say, “welp, close enough”, but an editor will see right through that. Remember that poor proofreading will sink a great piece faster like a pair of leaden Pumas. Don’t let your talent be hidden behind silly mistakes.

That said, feel free to post in the comments any and all of the mistakes you catch in this post. My goblins are on fire today.

The pen is mightier, etc.

P.S. I’d like to extend a special thank you to Phil over at beatbox32 (a talented, aspiring writer who is quite eloquently and thoughtfully chronicling his painful attempts to improve his craft whose blog you should definitely check out) for giving me some of the ideas to write this post.

Craft and Draft: Dialognostics

August 14, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

We’ve had a heart-to-heart about characterization. We’ve talked birds-and-bees about the ins and outs of drafting. We’ve danced, and laughed, and had one too many beers.

Now let’s talk about the tongue of good fiction: believable dialogue.

I find there are two main camps on this issue: those who think dialogue is stupidly easy and those who think dialogue is brain-bustingly difficult. I fall somewhere in the middle. Some characters seem to voice themselves naturally as I write, while others drool on themselves and grunt when trying the most basic of communication.

In concept, dialogue should be easy. You’re making your characters talk. To each other. Or themselves. We, as humans, talk to each other all day everyday. How hard is it take what is a perfunctory exchange and put it down on paper?

Really. Damn. Hard.

Dialognostics

(My theme accidentally shrank my pictures. I’m working to fix the CSS. In the mean time, feel free to click the images for full sized, readable versions.)

Fictional dialogue isn’t real human dialogue. As Gary Provost so aptly put it, “Dialogue is real speech’s greatest hits.”

Think about how you speak for a second. Even if you are the most intelligent and articulate sum’bitch in your postal code, you’re bound to drops some “ums” and “likes” and awkward pauses into your daily speech. These do not translate well onto the page, and make your writing seem crude and unpolished. This in turn “breaks the dream” for your readers, and makes them lose interest.

So you need to make your characters hyper-articulate to keep readers interested. Every sentence they utter should be intentional, clear, and character defining. I’ve even heard (and like the idea) that the very first thing your character says in your story is a snapshot of their personality.

Doesn’t seem so easy now, does it?

Let’s cover some common errors that turn terrific tales into tongue twisting terrors of tentacular torture.

1. Unqualified dialect

It may be tempting, as you build a world or place a story in a certain locale, to give your characters some regional spice by giving them clever accents. Unless you know that specific dialect perfectly (as in, you grew up immersed up to your neck in people speaking that way) avoid doing this.

It is incredibly difficult, and more often than not confused/distracts/offends your reader. See below:

A ‘lil cockney rhymin’ slang ain’t nevah ‘urt no one, no hows.

What we often forget as we craft our worlds is that our readers are smart. They can fill in blanks we leave behind, and will, if we let them. If your reader knows the story is set in an English-speaking suburb of Medieval France, you can bet your pants that they’ll automagically give the characters French accents, just because that’s how the human brain works with patterns.

If your setting is ambiguous (or nonexistent in real life, like in high fantasy or science fiction) then you can qualify the dialogue very early on by adding a tag like, “Anytime, mon cheri!” said Julius, his creole-like accent spilling through his clumsy pronunciation.

But seriously. Only do this is you have balls of titanium alloy and a pen made out of powerful ancient writing dust.

2. Inappropriate announcement

I’m very guilty of doing this; making characters say things to let the reader know a key detail, when the character already knows this detail and would never say it out loud.

It’s like a very heavy-handed soliloquy that just doesn’t work. These tend to slide themselves in during scene climaxes and endings, where you’re trying to reveal a universal truth or some story defining idea that your protagonist learned during their journey.

For example:

Needs significantly more explosions to live up to Mr. Bay.

In this case, pink Space-Lady wouldn’t need to say this out loud (to herself or anyone else) because she would have already drawn that conclusion in her head. It is your job as a writer to figure out how to make this message come through in the extra-dialogue writing, be it exposition or plot action.

You can try to have a symbolic event that passes this message along, or have your character find and read a note, giving us an omniscient view into her thoughts and in turn making the announcement seem less “here’s my awesome story defining idea let me shove it down your throat with some lemon juice and calamari.” There possibilities are near endless, but avoid a “Deus Ex Machina” moment by giving your reader a trite, obvious statement directly from a character.

(My “note” suggestion is highly dependent on the Point of View (POV) you’re working from, but that’s juicy writing-meat for another educational cookout.)

3. Inconsistent voicing

In a short story, it isn’t that hard to give a character a voice and have it carry over 3,000, 5,000, or even 10,000 words. You definitely have to pay attention, but since your narrative arc is relatively small, you only need to keep a voice consistent for a short period of time.

When you try to keep a voice consistent in a novel, things get all maple syrup really quickly. As the plot quickens and thickens and character motivations change, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep their voice inline with their established personality, but also situation appropriate. Even the most bubbly cheerleader is going to slightly change her tone when the werewolf lumberjacks and clawing at her door, but you, as the master of the universe, need to make sure she still sounds like the same cheerleader.

This get stupid-complicated when you bring in three, four, five, or ten characters in the course of a story. One out of place piece of dialogue that contradicts the characters established personality and motives can change (read: ruin) that character’s impact on the story:

The Uruk’hai are misunderstood creatures.

The easiest way to keep track of each character’s voice is to simply draw a picture. Or make an Excel speadsheet if you’re as nerdy as I am. Write down the “default” voice for each character, and then compare that voice to each scene.

For example – Johnny McTurnip Boots [default]: Melodramatic, kind of stupid. Johnny McTurnip Boots [when the monsters attack]: Overly emotional, panicked, has the stupidest suggestions for escape.

He’s the same character, but his voice changes appropriately per the scene he is in. I highly recommend visual aids to help organize your characters and scene, especially if your story is so complex it would make weaker men wet their brain-pants.

4. Poor placement and dialogue overdose

Dialogue fills two main roles in fiction: it gives your characters directly attributable voices and it speeds up narrative. Conversely, exposition can give insight into characters, but it also slows down the pace of the narrative.

While it seems logical to have your characters speak whenever they need to say something, counter intuitively, this may not be the best idea. If you’ve got a scene that is very, very dialogue heavy (say, 100% dialogue) your reader is going to blow through it very quickly. If you place that scene at a crucial point in the story, you may inadvertently cheapen what was supposed to be a poignant and heartfelt.

Ever notice that “Godot” has “God” in it? Whoa.

Balancing dialogue and exposition also keeps the reader interested as you’re weaving action, backstory, setting details, and unique voices into the writing all at the same time.

Try reading your story out loud. Are there places where you seem to warp through a section at lightspeed, skipping the Romulan fleet altogether and putting the entire Federation at risk? Do you find yourself switching between two characters so frequently that you can’t remember who is what or when or where?

You might find that you can break up your dialogue with some action and it will still be just as effective. Jumble the pieces if you have to. You can always Ctrl+Z.

5. Cliches and tags

Neither of these are so important to warrant their own section, but while I’m rambling, I figured I’d mention them.

Captain Rumbeard had always wanted to be a Belgian chocolatier, but his father would have never allowed it.

Avoid making your characters say thing that you hear other people say often, like “he’s a thorn in my side.” Instead say, “he’s jabbing at my innards with his pointy stick of annoyance.” Pass your draft to someone else and tell them to circle anything that seems familiar. Chances are, most of what they circle will be accidental cliches.

Be sure to also properly tag your dialogue. In my first novel (attempt) I used them very sparingly, and at some points, not at all. My beta readers were very confused. Drop little phrase like “said Stevie Mufflington” if it is unclear who is speaking, or if no character clearly identifies the other. You almost never need to use anything more than the past tense of say (said), but very judicious use of stronger words like “exclaimed” or “barfed” can work, if they’re not overused.

My last note is to openly talk to your characters. You know deep down what good dialogue sounds like; you’ve already read it and seen it on the screen. You may want to do this behind closed doors. Starbucks patrons don’t take kindly to you have a two-way conversation with completely imaginary people (who just so happen to be giant lizards who work on an oil rig).

Speak up. Write down.

Craft and Draft: Building Castles

August 6, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Not all of these posts are going to include Lego. Just most of them. Maybe I’ll do some in Minecraft to mix it up a little.

This post piggybacks off of my previous post about characterization, but is more focused on complete drafts.

Building Castles

As one of my enthusiastic classmates was waxing poetic about her experience revising her latest fiction piece, it struck me that the entire Draft Development Cycle (DDC) builds on itself. You’ve got all of the details, characters, and settings in your head, but they are raw, disorganized.

There is some strong magic swirling around the craft of writing that hides the creative process. Unlike master painters whose every brush stroke can be witnessed and studied, excellent writers seem pull their stories and skill out of the ether, as if it is an extension of their very soul. Young writers often don’t see the missing piece; the years and years of practice and patience and persistence.

This leads to disillusionment.

Like when you imagine an amazing picture of a bear riding a snowmobile firing laser blasters at robot dinosaurs, expecting it to look like this:

Why yes, I did Photoshop this myself. Thanks!

But when you finally draw it, it looks like this:

Yep, drew this myself.

See? Disillusionment.

As is the case with any creative art, it takes time to refine your skill and eventually master it.

As a writer, you have a singular advantage over painters and sculptures and sidewalk chalk drawers: your art is infinitely malleable. First draft sucks? No worries! Just rewrite the parts that suck until they unsuck. You can never make a mistake that can’t be rectified.

Drafting is like playing with Lego. You start with a blank, flat green board, have all the pieces you could ever need in a big plastic bin next to you, and can build anything you want. For this example, let’s say you want to build a picturesque castle. You imagine the castle in your head, and get to building.

1. Zero Draft

This is the very first draft of your piece that comes oozing out of the primordial goo that is your psyche, malformed, unsure that is should even exist. I call it the “zero” draft instead of the “first” draft, because chances are your main theme is underdeveloped or completely missing at this point. This is the draft where you let your brain shift the gears while you carelessly slam your foot down on the accelerator. As to be expected, you might crash and burn and suffer horrible injuries, or at least swerve wildly around the roadway, endangering everyone and everything around you.

The zero draft of your Lego castle would look something like this:

They told me I was daft to build a castle on the swamp, but I build it all the same.

It’s not not a castle, but it’s certainly not something you’d like to defend during a siege. But you’ve got a start, the bones, the basic structure of the castle, even if it’s little more than a pile of rocks with a flag at this point.

2. First Draft

After you’ve taken some time to evaluate the structural integrity of your castle, you can rewrite your zero draft and fix a lot of the problems. You can add content, remove stupid fluff, flesh out characterization, and really right the ship. Don’t go too crazy with fixing grammatical stuff at this point; you’re more concerned that the mortar of the castle will hold, than what color heraldry you’re going to put into the great feast hall.

The first draft of your Lego castle could look something like this:

This is what I imagine the front gates of Riverrun looks like. But you know, with more walls.

It’s a lot more castle-esque now. There is still a gaping hole in the back of the structure, and your guards would demand hazard pay to walk along those ramparts. But at least a drunken peasant could identify it as a castle now, which is a step in the right direction.

3. Draft X

The next draft is actually a series of drafts, in which you tweak your content, have other people read it, question character motives, and ask probing plot questions. This is when you build a tall tower for your gaoler, only to tear it down when you realize you don’t even have a dungeon. This is when you fill in the murder holes you added just behind portcullis because your kingdom isn’t, and will never be, at war. This is when you learn about your story, and can play with character desires, tweak dialogue, and repair any of those major plot holes that have been sucking the narrative into a mire of confusion and triteness.

The Draft X castle could look something like this:

What manner of man are you that can build a castle without rock or wood?

Or like this:

That is no Orc horn!

Now you have a castle to write home about. Unless the castle is your home. Then your letter won’t go anywhere. You can see that the walls are strong, and you’ve even made room for windows and arrow slits. The roof has taken shape, and you have staircases connecting the scenes for your characters to walk up and down.

It is important that even though your castle looks pretty good, you don’t stop. Stopping now would be like running a 100-yard dash and stopping at 95 yards. It’d be like baking a delicious cherry pie for 45 minutes when the recipe called for 60. It’d be like dressing yourself in the morning but intentionally not putting on pants. Don’t stop yet, you’re not done, but you’re almost done.

4. Final Draft

Getting here takes time and effort, so if you’ve made it: woot to you!

Now is when you get to really dissect the language of your story, correcting unintentional passive constructs, replacing boring verbs with explosive ones. This is also the time to adds bells and whistles; flesh out characters and setting descriptions, re-pace your action scenes, and de-mushify the romance.

Eyes to text as comb to hair.

This is what your final draft would look like, if it were a castle:

The horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound in the deep one, last, time!

Now you can pitch it or post it or sell it or just bask in the glow of your hard, tedious work.

Just remember: a castle (much like Rome) isn’t built in a day. Even the best architect needs to plan out how he uses his materials, which stone goes where, and how many beams are needed to support the weight of the roof. If your piece isn’t what you expected it to be, draft and draft again. The bin with the all the Legos is right next to you.

Dig in. Build. Draft. Create.

Craft and Draft: Character Counts

August 3, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I’m starting a new series on LitLib called, “Craft and Draft.” It’s going to be an out-loud, unfiltered learning experience for me that I hope others can benefit from as well. It’ll be focused on the drafting and revision process and all the crazy magic-voodoo shit I’m learning in grad school!

The great thing about the contextual ambiguity and synonymous nature of the words in the title is that I can use them interchangeably to talk about writing or beer. I am so clever.

Hope you enjoy. These posts will be filed under the “Literature” and “Writing” categories for future reference.

Disclaimer: I am a 26 year old male and still have a childlike infatuation with Lego. I also take bubbles baths when I’ve had a rough day, almost cried when Will Smith (Dr. Robert Neville) had to kill his dog after it got infected, think hydrangeas are pretty flowers, and know all the lyrics to That’s What Friends Are For by Dionne Warwick and Friends.

Deal with it.

Character Counts:

As happy productive authors, we all want to be parents to our characters, raise them up right, and teach them to hate the things we hate. But characters (and to a lesser extent personal voice in nonfiction) aren’t our children. They are our creations.

Authors don’t birth them and then guide them through life, letting them form their own theories and build an understanding of the universe through empirical trial and error. Hell no. We force their beliefs onto them without even asking, telling them what they’re passionate about, what they think about certain philosophical quandaries, and how they ultimately view the world.

We’re like Christianity, but with even crazier stories.

Therein lies a problem. We have to make these characters, and for them (and by extension our stories) to be good, they have to be believable. It is surprisingly difficult to completely flesh out a character, and new writers (like me) will often create Frankenstinian abominations where we meant to create maidens fair.

Stage 1: A Hero is born, sort of

In your planning phase, you might make a character biography. At this point, your character sounds awesome. He’s got a dark, messed up past, his beard is just the right length to be manly without being crazy, and his story arc makes Luke Skywalker’s seem like a lazy Sunday afternoon cruising around in an X-wing.

You imagine your characters looking and acting like this:

This is a rare deleted scene from the ill-fated Game of Thrones vs. Pirates of the Caribbean crossover.

But when you re-read your scene/chapter/short story/cocktail napkin notes, your protagonist seems more like this:

I say there, Monstrosity! Do you know the times?

I mean, it is kind of identifiable as some sort of humanoid, but there are some major problems here. One: his period-inappropriate tricorn hat is on fire. Two: He has two heads, one of which is completely black and has no face. Three: He has a sophisticated breathing apparatus on his chest, but also has a wooden leg. Four: His left arm is not attached to his body.

This is an extreme example, but my point remains. It is very difficult to properly build your character the first time around. He’s going to come out with conflicting motivations, bad dialogue, missing limbs, and possibly even a flaming hat.

But that’s OK! Now that you’ve got your scene, and see that your character clearly needs literary medical attention, you can work on fixing him. It is a habit of mine to dump as many details as possible into exposition, trying to give the character a voice and make him seem human. This isn’t a good idea. Learn from my mistake. The more details you have, the more there is to keep straight, and the more likely your character will seem like his brain doesn’t work correctly.

Stage 2: The Hero goes on a really boring journey

The great thing about word processors is that we can erase with reckless abandon. After revising and simplifying, you character might look like this:

Now he looks a little more…is that a lemon meringue pie?

He’s starting to resemble something that could possibly be confused with a human from a considerable distance!

The hat is still wrong, but at least it isn’t on fire. The parrot was inexplicably replaced by a pie. The technology in his chest still doesn’t match his wooden leg, but at least his arm is reattached.

Better. Closer. Warmer.

Still needs work, though. No one wants to read a story about a pirate/robot/pie shop owner. Do they?

Stage 3: The Hero descends into the underworld via a very, very long escalator

As you continue to revise, your character’s personality and thoughts may evolve requiring that you change major plot points or key exchanges with other characters. This sucks, but you have to do it. Trying to mash a scene or piece of backstory into the main narrative just because you like it normally doesn’t turn out very well. Re-write, re-hash, re-calculate, revise.

You’ll probably notice that your entire plot has changed along with your character. This is normal (for me at least). Run with it. Give in to your demons. Let the story do some of the work itself.

Something that often happens when you do a significant amount of rewriting is that completely new elements and characters get added to the story, which is simultaneously great and awful.

By now, your hero might look like this:

A midget alien, a wizard-deckhand, and a pistol wielding monkey walk into a bar…

The good news is that your hero is a believable human at this point! Some of his wardrobe choices are still a bit odd, but at least now his actions are in line with his motivations, and his dialogue is setting appropriate.

The bad news is that you can’t see how sweet he is becoming, because you’ve added vertically challenged aliens and sharpshooter monkeys who distract from your main hero. Supporting characters should do just that: support. They don’t need to be as in-focus as your protagonist, so feel free to cut back on them if they seem to be carrying too much word-weight.

Stage 4: The Hero returns and brought cheap, crappy souvenirs for everyone

By now, you’re sick of revising. But revising is like running; you can’t have ripped, washboard abs if you don’t do the cardio.

As you’ve pared and simplified, your hero becomes someone readers can relate to, because he’s not a bloated ideal or a hollow husk. He’s got skills and flaws, and all kinds of interesting history that lends to his being a character people attach themselves to. He might not be a Jamie Lannister or a Muad’dib, but he’s a certifiable human being.

Well done! You’ve accomplished the hardest part of characterization: making your reader want to read because your hero is innately interesting without being archetypal.

Your finished product may look something like this:

Simple is safe. That pistol doesn’t look very safe though.

He’s not flashy, but he doesn’t need to be. He’s complete, recognizable, relatable, and lovable (or hateable).

Moral of the story: Revise until you want to vomit. Then go vomit and revise some more. It is an idealistic pipe dream to expect your work to come out perfectly in one draft, so expel that from your mind now. Keep rewriting until you understand why your first few attempts at characterization failed so badly, so you can avoid those same mistakes in the future.

Rewriting counts as writing, so don’t feel like you’re not writing just because you’re revising. Yea. That makes sense.

Advocatus Diaboli

May 15, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

On top of my insatiable beer habit, I also have a healthy infatuation with video games.

I’ve been a gamer as long as I’ve been a computer user. I was typing nonsensical commands into the text field in King’s Quest before I’d even learned math. By third grade I knew most DOS commands, just so I could load my favorite games.

C:\>cd games, C:\>games>cd sierra, C:\>games>sierra>kq1.exe – the mantra of my childhood.

If you weren’t already aware, today marks the release of Diablo 3; a Blizzard Entertainment creation 12 years in the making. I wasted (enjoyed) hundreds of hours on Diablo and Diablo 2 back in middle and high school (respectively) and am a huge fan of the series. I played the open Beta a few weeks ago, and a happy to say the Diablo 3 looks like it is going to melt everyone’s face with its innate awesomeness.

Approximately nine hundred billion people wanted to play the second the servers went live. I get it. I really do. We’ve been eagerly awaiting this day for ten plus years, greedy little hands on our our greasy little mice, waiting with unabashed anticipation to hack and slack and loot. It’s not like there were any other good games in the past ten years to tide us over, so this is the culmination of a decade of rumors, theorycrafting, teasers, and tidbits of Diablo lore.

But the servers went down. It was a shock to gamers around the world, as we have no prior examples of this happening. Ever.

As I read the torrent of rage that flowed across the internet like lava flow of nerd tears, I got to wondering. Weren’t all of these people playing Diablo and Diablo 2 at the same time I was? Assuming they were similar age, shouldn’t they have jobs and responsibilities and families and cats? Do they really have time to explode into a dork-furor over some servers being down?

Am I the only gamer who grew up?

As my friend John put it: “You’ve waited over 10 years, a few more hours won’t kill you.” A couple more days won’t matter either. Unless you were scheduled to die in the next few days, in which case, I question why you’d want to play a video game for your remaining time left on this planet.

My advice? Do what I do. Get a job. Go to said job. Do work at said job for 8-9 hours. Eat a nice lunch. Write a blog post. Go home and see if the gaming universe has collectively calmed down.

If the servers are up, play for an hour or two. If the servers are down, hang out with your wife (or husband). Pet your kitty. Drink a beer. Go to bed.

If you absolutely need your Diablo fix because you’re a strung out heroin addict who would kill somebody for just a taste of sweet, sweet dungeon crawling, get creative.

Crazy creative.

Behold, the upcoming franchise: Lego Diablo 3!

Demon Hunter, Barbarian, and Wizard, obviously.

Bricks and Bytes

August 15, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

As a child, my obsession with LEGO was arguably unhealthy. I dreamt of filling a pool with the tiny multi-colored bricks; my dream-self diving deep into it, searching for that one 5×1 gray piece to finish my castle wall. Any time someone asked me what I wanted for my birthday/Christmas/being brave at the dentist, I excitedly mustered a two syllable grunt: “Le-go.”

I had pirate themed sets, medieval themed sets, sci-fi themed sets, and even a boring civil engineering set that included construction workers and a tanker truck. My room was a minefield of pointy plastic; bodies of small men with yellow heads and smiley faces strewn everywhere. I had more LEGO than I could keep track of, and I’m sure my mother was simultaneously happy with the joy it brought me and infuriated with the mess it made.

Although I grew out of formally playing with LEGO many years ago, my admiration for the versatility and creativity of the toy remains. I have a LEGO pirate on my key ring and a menagerie of various LEGO men (from knights to spacemen) on display in my office. On occasion, I even find myself engrossed in a video of the latest MindStorm creations, secretly wishing I had become and mechanical engineer so that I could still play with LEGO all day.

But then it hit me; I do still play with LEGO all day. Well, for large chunks of the day, anyway. It may not be LEGO in its original, multi-colored form, but it involves some sort of building blocks backed by logical order, used to create something tangible.

At work, I use Visio; a flow-chart program that involves logically placing and connecting blocks, to create an image. I organize SharePoint directories into logical hierarchies; like bricks stacked on bricks, color-coded for clarity. Even writing and editing is just a logical process of putting the right parts in the right places; anyone who has ever had to do a Reed-Kellogg knows exactly what I mean.

It follows me home too. I may not have huge plastic bins of smaller pieces of plastic tucked under every bed, but I do have a computer full of games. I just realized that some of my favorites – Minecraft, Terraria – are almost perfect digital reflections of my favorite childhood pastime. You literally collect and stack blocks of different kinds to create buildings and other large inanimate objects. It even includes elements of the incredibly frustrating but furious search for the one last block that you need to finish your architectural masterpiece. How many hours did you dig through that box of LEGO looking for a black block with a single dot (I called them “oners”)? About the same amount of time you spent mining deep into the blocky, 8-bit earth looking for a few errant diamond ore.

I think this is why I love these games. Their basic game play is the evolution of everything I loved as a child. My brain matured, the LEGO matured. All video games seem to contain an element or two of what made LEGO so engrossing and fun. Role-playing games have that element of subtle progression; each new item you get for your character is like a new tier you built on your underwater sea-fort. Real Time Strategies play out like an interactive LEGO instruction manual; build the spawning pool before you upgrade to a lair, place the blue blocks near the bottom, before you attach the wheels. Not spot on, but not overly tangential either.

Interestingly enough, the official LEGO attempts at games, while quirky and very fun in their own way, aren’t very much like LEGO at all. They play like traditional platformers, with very little homage paid to the pure art of brick-building. The focus in nearly all of the LEGO games I’ve played seems to be faithful recreation of the subject matter over innovative gameplay. They have many elements of collecting, rebuilding, and revisiting, but I can think of dozens of games closer to brick-building LEGO than the formal, licensed LEGO games.

So are video games just the adult version of LEGO? Do they fulfill the same intellectual urges, prodding our creative sides and stretching our imagination to fantastic new highs? For me, almost certainly. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to make the connection. Anyone else out there a LEGO-Maniac turned 1334 Gamer?

(Or maybe LEGO is like PRS Guitars...)