Dreamer's Requiem

When I began my hobby writing, I started with a short story. The
story was not a happy one. It was inspired by The Pit and the Pendulum
by Edgar Allen Poe, but it did not have the deus ex machina ending
that Poe’s story had. I cried writing it. At least one of my readers
cried reading it. I cautiously began to think that I was already
writing well. Then I read John’s review of my story.

John is probably my best literary critic. He is honest with his
opinions, and he points out the parts of the story that don’t work for
him. It’s a harsh but fair critique. His problem with my short story
was that I had given him no reason to care for the main character. I
believe his words were, “You spend almost the entire story kicking
this guy in the balls, but you have to give me a reason to like him
before that means anything.”

Several of my other readers said they liked the story, and gave ideas
for rephrasings here and there, that sort of thing. John was the
reader who dug deepest into the whys and wherefores of his opinion. So
despite a lot of general approval, I took his comments seriously. I
asked for details and tried to work out what needed to be there, but
John’s answers were never quite solid enough for me to act on.

A few months later, I start reading How to Grow a Novel by Sol Stein.
Reading this book cleared away my fog of confusion around what John
was trying to tell me about my story. The problem was that John isn’t
a writer, or an editor; he is a lawyer. He could tell that something
important was missing from the story, but wasn’t able to clearly
explain what was needed. After reading Stein’s book, I can see where
the main character from my story was flat and dull. He doesn’t get
much life at all until near the end of the story.

Chapters three and five, Capturing the Reader and Characters Who are
Characters, helped me see how to bring that character to life, and how
to liven up the cast around him. The first was that he had nothing to
distinguish him from any other random person. He had no habits,
quirks, anything. He needed something more than walking and talking to
make him a person. Stein mentions Sherlock Holmes’s drug addiction as
such a trait, a flaw in this case, that makes the character seem more
human and alive.

A trick he recommends to help stimulate your creativity when dealing
with a stubbornly flat character, is to have a look in his pockets.
What you find there may be something embarrassing, interesting, maybe
dangerous. Just knowing about that secret thing the character has may
bring him to life and help you write him. As Stein says, “Any
character with a credible, interesting secret has a good chance of
coming alive.”

Reading his advice, I should be able to liven up that flat character
and save a new character who was dangerously close to suffering the
same fate.

You should give How to Grow a Novel a look, especially if it’s
available in your local library. You might also want to check out his
other books, Stein on Writing and Solutions for Writers: Practical
Craft Techniques for Fiction and Non-Fiction.

Scribblenauts is the best video game for writers since Story Machine for the Atari 400. Maxwell, the main character in Scribblenauts, is faced with hundreds of different challenges, from fixing breakfast to quelling a prison break. He only has one tool he can use to accomplish this, a magic notepad that summons anything he writes on it.

Let me illustrate with the first puzzle you encounter, having to collect a star from the top of a tree. You can spell out S-A-W in the magic notebook to summon a saw with which Maxwell can cut down the tree. If that is too simple, you could spell out C-H-A-I-N-S-A-W to summon a chainsaw, and then L-U-M-B-E-R-J-A-C-K to summon a lumberjack who can use the chainsaw to cut down the tree for you. You can even spare the tree entirely by summoning a grappling hook to pull down the star, or an elevator to lift you up to the top of the tree.

Solutions to the  puzzles are limited only by your imagination and your vocabulary, unless your vocabulary is larger than the 30,000+ nouns that are in the Scribblenauts dictionary. The game also encourages creativity. You get higher scores for using words you haven’t used before, as well as creative combinations of words.

There is also a sandbox mode, in which you can just summon and play with whatever you wish. If you want to strap on a pair of Icarus wings, your trusty death ray and join a pogo stick riding nunchaku wielding Zeus in a battle to the death with Cthulu, you can do that too.

Scribblenauts is definitely worth a rental, and packs a lot of entertainment for $30. If you or your kids have a Nintendo DS, you should give it a look. Scribblenauts is available now.

Dropbox has been making the rounds on the blogosphere lately. I
first found out about Dropbox from Lifehacker. At the time, I wasn’t
pursuing writing. I installed it, but didn’t really make much use of
it except as a way to back up files. I saw it as something very useful
to the right person. That person just wasn’t me. Six months later, I’m
trying to write a novel, writing on three different machines. Dropbox
became invaluable.

I chose Dropbox over other similar applications, like SugarSync and
UbuntuOne, because it works on all the major platforms. It syncs
between my Windows desktop and both of my Linux laptops. If I ever get
the Macbook I am constantly tempted by, it will sync my files there as
well.

Of course, to make the most of this, you have to have compatible
applications on all platforms as well. That’s where OpenOffice comes
in. With versions on all three major OS platforms, it makes frequent
switching between platforms so easy.

The price is also hard to beat. A 2GB Dropbox account is free. You
can also earn more storage space by referring friends. Each referral
adds 250MB to your storage. There are also paid accounts for 50GB and
100GB of storage. These cost $9.99 and $19.99 respectively.

With all of my writing files synced between machines, I don’t have
to worry about backing up my work or transferring it from one machine
to another. Dropbox handles all this for me. If I do any writing while
I’m away from an internet connection, Dropbox will sync up my work as
soon as I’m back online, at home or at the local coffee shop.

If, like me, you’re one of the iPhone crowd, there is a Dropbox App for the
iPhone in the approval process with Apple. The sneak preview shows a
list of nice features for viewing your files. Unfortunately, there doesn’t
seem to be any way of copying the files. The folks at Dropbox claim that
the 1.0 version of the app is just the beginning of the feature list. I’m
hoping for bluetooth or ad hoc wireless file transfer, although I don’t know
if such a feature would be against Apple restrictions or not.

If you do all your writing on one machine, then Dropbox may be
useful to you as an easy to use backup service. If you write on
multiple machines or write on the go, then you should definitely check
out Dropbox or a similar service to keep your files and notes up to
date on all your machines.