ScriptSuperhero.com

I do a lot of review writing, and when you review as many videogames and movies as I have over the past seven years or so, it gets a little challenging to keep things fresh. If you’re not careful, you can end up blathering on about Mulberry trees just to keep yourself amused and avoid the cliches that are part and parcel of review writing.

I can’t count how many times anymore that I’ve had to review a videogame and talk about an RPG battle system that is not really essentially all that different than the other 200-some RPGs I’ve reviewed over the years. But it’s been a lot of them.

The best thing I’ve found is to contextualize the reviews, setting them into some sort of historical perspective. However, that can get tedious as well after a while; but for now, it’s my best current solution.

There’s been a fair amount of other writing getting in my way of working on my novel of late. It’s a bit frustrating. I know I need to write my Torah commentaries and videogame reviews and blog assignments on a regular basis to keep all my plates spinning, but it’s my novel that really energizes me lately, and it’s been about a week since I’ve had a chance to make any progress.

Tonight is a prime example. I’d much rather be working on 30 Minutes Or Less, but here I am, blogging away. Ugh. Such is life, sometimes. At least it beats a job doing pvc fence installation.

I recently had a chance to hear from my old writing mentor, MSU-Mankato writing professor and novelist Terry Davis. Davis was pivotal to my development as a writer and I recently jotted off an email to him, bringing him up-to-date on my writing career since my college years ended 16 years ago.

Davis is still an active writer and busy professor, but he took some time to reply and still offer a few words of encouragement. It’s nice to know that after all this time and all the students who’ve come and gone in the time since I was under his tutelage, he still remembers me.

While I have a basic respect for all teachers, rare are the ones who become real mentors to you. Davis was probably the most influential on my life. Anyone who hasn’t read Vision Quest, Mysterious Ways, or If Rock-N-Roll Were A Machine, It’d Be A Motorcycle are really missing out. Although he works in the young adult genre, there’s little in his work that meditates on the trivial aspects of growing up, like acne; Davis’ novels are mediations on the nature of being alive, no matter what age one might be.

This week, I have to write a 30-minute sermon as well as a 10-15-minute Torah commentary for my church. That’s about 40-45 pages of sermonizing, and I’ll probably get it done in an evening or two, since I’ve already done most of my research.

I’m about that many pages into my novel after working on it for nearly three months now. I’m not discouraged by the comparison, though; sermons are far easier to write than novels.

Sermons, by their nature, are polemics. You express opinion, share wisdom and insight from research, and generally bring it all together under a common theme.

Novels, by comparison, are a far more complex task. You have to track the lives and personalities of dozens of “cast members,” and have them behave believably in a variety of situations. It’s not always easy to figure out how that will serve the plot, and of course the plot itself consumes time to work out and develop correctly.

With a sermon, there are no such concerns. In that respect, it’s a lot like delivering a lecture in an academic setting, though a lecture is basically a sermon on diet pills.

As I’ve dug into writing my Pizza Delivery Mystery novel, Thirty Minutes Or Less, one of the fun things I’ve been able to do is create my own fictional setting. Although based heavily on places I have lived, this setting is a mixture of enough of them that I’ve fictionalized it.

My novel will be set in the relatively small city of Hope, Wisconsin. There is no such place (that I know of), but it is based on nearly five years of living in small rural towns in northwestern Wisconsin as a journalist. While Hope is, by necessity, a bit bigger than several of the towns I knew, the flavor and character of those towns will all be found, part and parcel, throughout Hope.

From the Packers-loving retired elementary school teacher selling cheap auto insurance, who I introduce early in my novel, to the suddenly-single-parent county Sheriff who is featured throughout, all of my characters are tiny bits and pieces of people I actually knew, reassembled into a pastiche of all of them.

Getting to know the character and flavor of an area can be a great training ground for building a believable fictional world, based on but not exactly reflecting the real people you encounter while living there.

One of the things that has been driven home to me by reading the novels of Charlaine Harris is how important setting is to the success of a novel. It is the uniquess of Harris’ Bonne Temps, Louisiana, setting for her Sookie Stackhouse novels that helps to make her vampire-centric mysteries uniqe from Laurel K. Hamilton’s New York setting for her Antia Blake novels.

Sure, there are other differences in tone and writing style; but the setting is what gives each novel flavor and texture and uniqueness. It’s like the difference between an LA townhouse and a two-story colonial set on some prime Wilmington NC real estate.

One of the damaging elements of TV shows and movies is that probably two-thirds of mass media entertainment is set in either New York or Los Angeles. Yet that is so incredibly limiting. And I’ve seen many a young fiction writer attempt to seem sophisticated by setting their stories in New York or Los Angeles just to fit in, despite growing up nowhere near those settings.

That’s what makes novels fun. Harris knows how to embrace her Southern roots, so her fictional worlds have a style all their own. While any soulless screenwriter can fake a New York or Los Angeles vampire story, only someone from the Deep South, like Harris, could write about Bonne Temps, LA, convincingly.

While many people prefer to give green gifts these days, I’m still a fan of the helpful, practical variety. For example, if you have a friend who’s a writer, helping them untie a knot in the plot of their story is certainly going to be appreciated far more than some trinket.

For example, since I am beginning a series of mystery novels, I have to think of clever ways for people to die, and then even more-clever ways for that death to be mistakenly interpreted. After all, if the evidence were clear, there’d be no mystery, correct?

Unfortunately, people look at you funny, even suspiciously, when you start asking questions like, “If someone swallowed a lethal dose of rat poison, how long would it take for them to die, and if they were severely beaten up as well, would the poison be obvious enough to be the actual cause of death on a coroner’s report?”

Still, it’s questions like that that mystery writers must grapple with to come up with satisfyingly hard-to-guess mystery thriller plots, and a little professional expertise is always welcome.

Mediterranean cruises are out of the question until I finish my new novel and get it accepted somewhere, but that’s one of the beautiful things about completing a project; it’s the first step toward getting something in print and reaping the rewards of that success.

It may seem obvious to say this but: you can’t be a published writer if you never finish anything you write. I know, I know, it’s completely obvious. But sometimes one needs the obvious to kick ‘em in the face before it finally sinks in. I really do want to be a published novelist; it’s time to start completing novels.

I call it “the James Patterson method,” but it’s working for me; one of the best tools I’ve found in making progress on my new novel and not losing interest is to write in short bursts. Rather than composing a novel of maybe twenty chapters of twenty-to-forty pages each - long, ponderous things to write or to read - I am limiting myself to several brief, single-scene chapters.

At the end of it all, I’m aiming at writing about 120 chapters, with an average length of three to five pages each. It gets me the same place, but the important part from a creative aspect is that, usually, I can compose a single chapter in one sitting, and so feel a sense of completion and accomplishment each and every time I sit down to write.

It also means that unless I slack off and take Orlando vacations several times (which I don’t have the budget for anyway), I should be done with the first draft of this puppy by New Year’s Eve.

It’s a great, achievable goal to shoot toward.

After spending five years doing sports journalism in northwestern Wisconsin, I developed a tribute community as a fictional setting for some of my stories, based on those experiences. Hope, Wisconsin is what I named it, and it’s an amalgamation of all my Wisconsin experiences.

I first visited hope in a graphic novel project I’m still working toward completion on, but is quite honestly on the back-burner at this point. It was a bit smaller and grittier than the version of Hope I’m envisioning for my new mystery novel series.

Although I’ve grown the size of Hope, it is still the same place I first envisioned when I started creating it about eight years ago. While I need it to be bigger to be an appropriate setting for a series of murder mysteries, it’s not growing that much; perhaps you could even say I’m just exploring the previously unexplored neighborhoods of Hope.

While there are not Orlando golf getaways in Hope, there are plenty of interesting folks and plenty of dark places where a human body could be stashed away. Just the perfect place for my mystery series.

It feels great to be writing a novel again, for the first time in over a decade. I’d let myself venture into the world of script-writing, working on comic book and stage projects, but honestly never really finishing anything for the last several years.

Now, I’m a few short chapters into a very exciting-to-write novel and feeling energized like never before about it. And it’s odd, because this burst of creativity comes on the heels of my mother’s death at the hands of pancreatic cancer; at a time like this, you’d think I’d be in no mood to write. Yet I am.

While an Outer Banks getaway would seem more fun, perhaps this is God’s way of comforting me through this difficult time; by giving me a novel idea and the energy to see it through, perhaps it will become my first published novel, and I can dedicate it to her.

One of the nice things about writing is that it’s largely unaffected by trendiness. I’m not talking about story styles or the popularity of genres. I’m talking about accessories and tools.

I mean, I use a fairly standard Acer Aspire and MS Office 2007, and while other folks may prefer an earlier version of Word, or a different brand of computer, it’s not like, say, shoes; there’s not UGG Australia word processor out there that all the hot, fashionable writings are composing their scripts with.

I hope the day where that changes never comes.