One Million Words

Last week in the workshop there was talk about what it takes for a new writer to become published. One measurement was that it takes a new writer on average one million words to get to a point where their stuff is good enough for the market.
I took a look at the 'official' stuff I've written since deciding to work on publishing. I've got about 80,000 words, or 8% of that million word mark. I haven't included a 18,000 word story that I wrote 8 years ago and another 'big' story that's about 4,000 words. One is scifi humor, and the other is a vampire novel that needs a lot of work to make it a unique contribution to the genre. Even so, it pushes me closer to 10%. So if I estimate 100,000 words in a three month period, it will take 30 months, close to three years, to get to that point.
Sobering thought.

So much for the character generator

Last Tuesday at the workshop one of the established writers was giving away a pile of books (a trick I've never learned) because he was moving and wanted to reduce the amount of stuff he had to haul across town. I picked up a copy of a book that does more for character generator than my program ever did.

I've also discovered story treatments, something I really hadn't done before. Yes, I'd thought about my stories and plotted them all out, but I never managed to get the nub of an entire story down to a one page description. I wrote one for a friend who wanted to know what kind of story I was working on, and now I think it's a valuable tool. I'm writing treatments for all of the stories I haven't finished or are still in draft format.

Seems so simple, doesn't it? Of course I'd heard the advice that short story writers should get everything down to one paragraph, then embellish. I tend to work from the other end of the scale. Another writer described is as a noveling approach, rather than a short story approach. I'll write a very long text and then try to cut it down. Creating a story treatment helps with the focus on the essential story while I edit. I've had 6,000 word stories boil down to 2,000 words. The extreme case a friend told me about was a 35,000 word story down to 13,400. Unfortunately that version was hard to read.

Stealing titles

One of the things I struggle with in my writing is creating a good title. The stories I've written in the past few months have had simple titles that don't always work with the story: No Place Like Home, Body Double, The Last Wizard, The Mechamancer. I asked my carpool mates about titles and they gave me a few good suggestions: First, be willing to abandon a working title (and make sure you change it in the manuscript); Second, read the text for the themes of the story, it is possible that a phrase in the text leads to a much better title.

One of the stories that we read last night had an odd title, and one of the reviewers thought a phrase right on page 2 of the MS was the perfect title, or at least a really good title. The writer who wrote the line might not use the title, but the reviewer might use it. I already did. When I got home at midnight I couldn't sleep and sat down and wrote a 1,650 word drafty by 1 a.m. The title attached itself to a story that I have been trying to write for the past ten years or so.

So I've stolen a title. It's probably not a big sin in the writing world. After all, how many book and movie titles come from Shakespeare?

Person A

I finished programming several attributes for random characters and came up this output:

Attractiveness: Good Looking

Wealth: Average Wealth

Advantages: High Pain Threshold, Clerical, Empathy, Ambidexterity

Disadvantages: Berserk, Bully, Bad Tempered

Skills: Stealth, Jeweler, Animal Handling, Writing, Bard

Skin Color: White with Freckles

Hair Color: Brown

Eye Color: Gray

Strengths: Adaptability, Signifance, Ideation, Analytical, Relator

Life Events: Crippled, Broken Arm, Marriage, Crippled

Now I realize that using so many gaming terms in my randomization can make things difficult to write about non-gaming scenarios. Ah well. Let's work with what we're given. Looking at the life events this person seems to have eternal bad luck: Crippled twice. This could indicated that they had a crippling accident, was healed, and crippled again in a different way (or the same way, this persons story might involve a 'no such thing as a free lunch' moral, or parallel 'Flowers for Algernon').

The Strengths come from the book "Now, Discover Your Strengths" by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O Clifton. The disadvantages of a gaming source is that it will push me to think of gaming situations (not always bad if this person is in a fantasy story). The disadvantages of the Strengths are that they are geared towards the business world. Some of them seem to fall under the same category, and I will probably reduce the words or come up with new ones. This persons strengths include Adaptability, so perhaps they handled the life changes pretty well. Challenging their adaptability to the limits (say, repeating the same accident that left them crippled) may make a good story. 'Significance' indicates that they want to 'be someone.' This person wants to be valued for who they are, for their life to have meaning. 'Ideation' may be a curse of philosophy. Searching for the core idea underneath things. I'll ignore the other two for now, because the Strengths alone can be used to create a fairly complex person with desires and needs, and I want to explore the rest of it.

The Advantages (ripped from GURPS) tell me that this person might not have known how badly hurt they were in whatever accident crippled them. Clerical in game terms can be replaced with 'active religious life' in some genres. Empathy and Ambidexterity are pretty self explanatory.

The disadvantages are from a RPG, but they fit in various genre's. Unfortunately this persons disadvantages are all along the same line. They're a bully, bad tempered, and if pushed he breaks things. Perhaps they were having a really bad day and caused the crippling accident.

The skills (again ripped from the RPG concepts) indicate some of the things that flavor the character: Stealth could mean that they were very sneaky as a child and now that they are in a walker/wheelchair/cybernetic body augmentation they need to relearn that skill for a particular task. Jeweler tells me that one of the things this person did to help recover from the crippling accident was making jewelry. This could be for two reasons: One, they lost their legs and need to focus on something small and upper body detailed. Two, their arms were crippled an making jewelry was used to help them recover their manual dexterity. Bard is so obviously a gaming term, but I think it can mean something as simple as a musical disposistion. This person sang solos in their church choir.

The physcial descriptions are there to remind me that I have to decsribe characters in my stories. It's one of my faults.

So far I've written a lot of speculation. Later entries won't go this far into the thinking process as I streamline the thinking process. Here's a brief biography of Person A:

As a child, Person A was active in a religious community, performing traditional and original pieces on an instrument that allowed them to stand and sing. They came from an upper middle class family and enjoyed some local popularity. Person A dreamed big dreams of taking their music and message to a larger audience. Person A would have been called a prodigy in their field. While popular with adults, other children did not get along with Person A, who was seen as egotistical and pushed other children around.

On the verge of young adulthood this person was upstaged by an older person who came into their area and Person A was temporarily forgotten.
Person A hatched a plan that involved them sneaking around backstage during a performance and causing their 'enemy' to lose their instrument and reputation. Things when wrong and the sabotage led to an accident that left them unable to walk. This led to a depression that was healed with crafts. They were apprenticed to a jewelry maker and began making jewelry inspired by the religious and musical background that they enjoyed as a child.

Still working with a growing moodiness and bad temper over the 'unfairness of the world' Person A managed to become quite a good craftsperson, but did not recieve the recognition that they expected and saw positive recognition of their work as 'pity the cripple.'

A burst of anger over another round of 'pity the cripple' Person A tried to get violent and managed to break their arm. Now Person A could not perform or create jewelry. Person A suffered from depression and avoiding everyone. Left alone in self-exile, Person A is visited by a soothsayer/councilor and gives person A access to Big Ideas. Person A comes to accept some variation of "When life gives you lemons, steal some sugar and make lemonade."

A healer arrives in Person A's life who can undo the damage done when Person A was crippled in the sabotage activity. Person A regains control of their mood and picks up the musical instrument that they hadn't touched in years. Finding the skills are still there, enhanced by the feeling of new life and rebirth, Person A returns to religious devotion.

By this time Person A is at marriagable age and jumps into the prospect immediately. Feeling the rush of life and joy, if not endless success, of renewed life keeps Person A going for several years until their oldest (or only) child is about ten years old.

Another musician, similar to Person A's prodigy childhood, takes umbrage to poorly chosen words that relfected Person A's childhood ego rather than their joyful life and decided to teach Person A a lesson, much like Person A tried to do. "What comes around goes around." The accident takes the life of thier child and spouse, and breaks the instrument that they'd had all of their life.

Person A is crippled again, back to where they were before the healer intervened. Person A spends the rest of their life bitter and overly critical of musicians.

There are more opportunities for redemption in Person A's life, and I didn't even touch 'empathy' in their life. There are times in this biography where person A may have learned empathy and the rest of their life may have been completely different. They may have been able to avoid the second crippling accident. I also didn't deal with "Animal Handling." Obviously not everything the character generator spits out is useful. The way I created this biography I just didn't find a place for Empathy. The apparent bad luck of their life has driven events. Person A could react in different ways.

A few things that are missing: Name, gender, world, etc. I've kept it generic so I could plug this person into a story at any time in their life into any genre. The instrument person A plays could be a lyre, harp-guitar, or electronic zither. The religous devotion could be to some local patron Saint, some god, famous ancestor, or the monotheistic God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The accident could take place on a small wooden stage in a courtyard or a 40,000 seat arena. The healer could be magical or scientific. Details can be adapted to any genre.

So there is Person A. Future biographies probably won't have all of the background thinking process that I've shown here.

Testing the Character generator

I've written a Character Generator using an old GURPS manual. I had to write a few supportive programs to make the randomization normalized instead of random, as in the case of physical appearance. I don't want one hundred characters, 20 Ugly, 20 Unattractive, 20 Average, 20 Attractive, and 20 Beutiful. I wanted to fit these to a bell curve.

The advantage of GURPS is that it is not aimed purely for action and combat. I tried looking at the models of character generation from Vampire, but the character traits are all aimed at making a decent and playable vampire. Other White Wolf games follow that same basic limitation. Dungeons and Dragons character generation system is almost entirely combat based. I don't want to write combat scene after Combat scene.

I also have a similar system based on the 34 personality traits from "Be Who You Are" which I read for a personal and professional development course. The limitation with this system is that it focuses on strengths, not weaknesses. Good characers in writing need both.

The upshot is that GURPS provides me with a long list of descriptive words, loosely grouped into categories. That's what I want. I started with the words GURPS uses and added my own.

For example, with only a few groups of words programmed and ready to randomize I got the following descriptions: Attractive, Wealthy, Lightning Calculator, Combat Reflexes, Voice, and Acute Taste and Smell. The first character who comes to mind is an Olymic class fencer who gives lectures and demonstrations. Probably a lover of fine foods and wines, which fits into the idea of wealthy. The problem? No disadvantages to exploit. I'm pretty sure overconfidence would be a typical flaw, but to make something unexpected, I need the power of randomization to keep things interesting.

So I moved onto programming a list of disadvantages and spat out a new list of words: Ugly, Average Wealth, Military, Absolute Timing, Acute Hearing, Lightning Calculator, One Hand, Overconfident, Phobia. This almost describes a character that I'm working with in one of my current stories, who is ex-military and spent several years as a con artist and theif before landing on a very quiet world. Absolute Timing would help this character, and I've already written him to have Acute Eyesight, or at least eyes that have been trained to scan for enemies, spot snipers, and case buildings for security systems. I even thought about him having lost one arm. Overconfident? He certainly is, but in the story as it sits that isn't a problem. Phobia? I hadn't gotten that far with the character. He might have a fear that he hasn't overcome, a fear that he has overcome but is returning, or he might develop a fear during a story.

The character generator is helping already. I want to find a few more features that I can incorporate into this program. I know somewhere I found a Role Playing Tool for creating a biography, or at least ideas for them.

So the characters I create for this blog will have a list of personality traits, a simple biography that describes them as children, teens, adults, and elderly. I will include randomized events that may form the background of a character for a story or may even become the story.

The character generation program is designed to encourage creativity. If I need a quick character in a story, I can run the program and get a lsit of words, and work that character in. I don't expect to get a good character to do the job in the story all the time, but I should avoid dull characters, I hope.

Off to a new start

This blog will focus on my writing career. My other blogs focus on theology, working, and my general reaction to the world. The first thing I am going to experiment with is writing generic biographies of characters that can become characters in future stories.

My other blogs are listed on the side bar.