I don’t think I’ve posted in at least a week…I had a surprise 5-day weekend due to snow and between that and being sick for the past few days, keeping track of time has been harder than it should be lately! Also, because of said sickness, this probably isn’t the best post I’ve ever written (in my defense, so far today I’ve forgotten that every day has to be a day of the week, told my roommate I was floating, and stared at a gif of a cat spinning for 2 minutes before laughing uncontrollably), but I wanted to post up on here anyway because I’m trying to get on a regular, frequent schedule with it.
In Intro to Creative Writing, for the past two or so days, we’ve been discussing characters and stories, how to build characters, what causes conflict, what the progression of a story is, etc–all things that I naturally knew about and knew how to do just by having seen it before and done it myself (and taken Creative Writing twice in high school). But it was surprising to me how much I didn’t really think about this “basic” stuff before my professor started talking about it. It’s like the difference between being innately able to use logic as a human being, and being able to explain logic and know its inner workings–something my Logic teacher last semester liked to say.
For example, the principle of “show, don’t tell.” It’s really common and even cliche advice to state things indirectly and provide details rather than using flat statements. What I didn’t consider before my professor brought it up was that these indirect methods of providing details make a reader work. The reader has to judge the details and put the picture together on their own. It’s, as he said, “honoring the reader’s intelligence,” their ability to figure it out from details given rather than just be told “She was sad” or something.
Then there’s conflict and plot. A plot comes from the main character wanting something, and obstacles being put in their way of getting that thing. However, every character needs to want something–and if everyone wants something, but is having obstacles in the way of their getting it, then everyone has their own “plot”–this leads to characters coming into conflict with each other. And as the writer, you control everyone in that big struggle: it’s like playing chess against yourself, commanding both sides.
Well…that’s all I’ve got for today, I guess. However, I should mention that our creative writing class has us putting all our work on a personal school blog, and I think I’ll be putting whatever I post there onto here as well! I also got a Twitter recently because…hey, why not. So I’ll be linking it to this blog sometime soon.
sebspiration 