Monday, October 5, 2009

Time to Nut Up or Shut Up!

Today's title brought to you by Zombieland. If you're looking for comedy and zombies, watch Zombieland.

All kidding aside, it was a great movie. Gary, Jeff, and I went to see it last Friday and the line quoted in the title is going to be with me for weeks. It's simple and direct, and expresses volumes about the character who utters it. It is the character summed up in one phrase. I mean, wow, just wow.

That's one of the things I love about writing; the moment you find just the right phrase and everything just clicks together like a purring machine. It's something I'm working towards, and not much progress was made the last week. I'm still waiting on Gary for feedback, but we have discussed the story and he had a lot of good points. I'm hoping to have his input by tomorrow so I can take it into account when I resume revision.

You're probably wondering what I've done the last week. Well, without more feedback on the story I've been working on background material on the setting. I intend to reuse it, and maybe the characters as well. I have nearly 6 full pages single spaced of background material, and that is still likely to expand.

Something Gary said stuck with me. The antagonist in my Tesseracts story came off as one dimensional to him. Now, granted this characters function is to be more or less a force of repression on the protagonist, and by trying to stay under 7500 words I have to be careful in what I put in, so the character may not get much more time in this story. However, that doesn't prevent me from reusing him in a different story - maybe even recount the events of the same day from his perspective and show the opposite arc. In the current story the protagonist goes from being low to a new high, while in the alternate story the antagonist in the original story can go from high to low.

I'll need to put some thought into this.

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