“When you read the book,” says Pattinson, … “it’s like, ‘Edward Cullen was so beautiful I creamed myself.’ I mean, every line is liked that. He’s the most ridiculous person who’s so amazing at everything. I think a lot of actors tried to play that aspect. I just couldn’t do that. And the more I read the script, the more I hated this guy, so that’s how I played him, as a manic-depressive who hates himself. Plus, he’s a 108 year-old virgin so he’s obviously got some issues there.”¹

Well, he just gave an excellent run down of what a bad character Edward is. And this guy would know better than anyone, since he was to act the role.

“I’ve spent a long time thinking, “How can I take the whole [Edward is] beautiful thing as an interpretation?” And I realized that it’s just Bella saying he’s so beautiful and she’s just in love with him and obsessed with him so he could be like a piece of cheese and she would think the same thing.”²

It’s funny because Bella’s character is legitimately like this.

I read the book and was like “Well this is really dumb, I’ll never ever… This is so pointless going up for the role.”²

Actually, this is quote mined, and doesn’t sound at all like that in context. Still funny though. :P

¹ Empire Magazine October 2008

² Comcast Summer Movie Guide

Comment [19]

This should refresh you on some of the basic similarities between Star Wars and Inheritance. Coincidence? I’m not too convinced. ((Parts in double parentheses are additions by Sally.))

Eragon / Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

Eragon¹ grows up on a subsistence farm in a remote part of the world² with his uncle. Eragon finds a mysterious object, sent by a rebel princess, and intended for someone else. The mysterious object results in the destruction of the farm and the death of Uncle Garrow³ at the hand of the Empire’s⁴ agents. The agents search of Eragon, but the object leads him to the town bum ((and the person for whom the mysterious object was in fact intended)), Brom⁵. Brom leads Eragon to safety from the Empire, shows him that he is a dragon rider⁶, and trains him in magic⁷. And he gets a special sword that only dragon riders yield (and they have special colors)⁸, ((which at one point is revealed to have been his father’s)). Eragon insists on rescuing the elven princess Arya⁹ from the Empire’s massive dungeon¹⁰. Trouble occurs when the Emperor’s right hand man, Durza¹¹, a black magic user¹², arrives on the scene. Brom sacrifices himself to fight Durza while Eragon and Arya escape. Eragon meets a handsome, morally gray, scoundrel who assists him, Murtagh¹³. Shortly after arriving at the rebel camp, the Empire attacks in force, but is defeated.

Eldest / Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

In Eldest, Eragon travels to see his new mentor, Oromis¹⁴, a powerful dragon rider whose existence was a secret. ((Eragon studies with Oromis for a while, but before his training is complete he runs away to help his friends.)) The Rebels are being chased by the Empire, and are forced to relocate in Surda¹⁵. ((Meanwhile, Eragon’s sibling’s beloved Katrina¹³ is captured by the Empire, and he will aid in her rescue at the beginning of the next installment.)) The Empire and the Rebels have a showdown, where it is revealed that Murtagh is Eragon’s brother, and their father was the Emperor’s old right hand man, Morzan¹⁶. ((In the process, Eragon loses his sword.))

Eragon explanations:

¹ Luke Skywalker

² Tatooine

³ Uncle Garrow

⁴ The Galactic Empire

⁵ Obi-wan Kenobi

⁶ Jedi Knight

⁷ The Force

⁸ Lightsaber

⁹ Princess Leia

¹⁰ The Death Star

¹¹ Fake Darth Vader

¹² Dark Force

¹³ Han Solo

Eldest explanations:

¹⁴ Yoda

¹⁵ Hoth

¹⁶ Some interesting things to consider here. Some people like to argue that this isn’t a blatant rip-off, because Leia was supposed to Luke’s sibling. But all Christopher Paolini is doing is subtracting the relationship from Arya and adding it to Murtagh. The underlying value of the equation hasn’t changed. There is also some role confusion between Morzan, who is clearly Darth Vader, and Durza who is also clearly Darth Vader. ((I would argue that Durza isn’t Vader, who does little or no direct fighting in the first movie, but rather a humanoid incarnation of the Death Star. By hitting the critical spot, Eragon/Luke is able to destroy him/it. Instead, it’s Murtagh who steps into the role of Vater for the later books.)) Paolini just took Darth Vader and split him into two personality lacking villains. As it turns out, Morzan was a member of the ancient order who went to the dark side, betrayed it, and lead it to its downfall.

Comment [36]

As the release of Brisingr draws near, I thought I would release my predictions of the events that will unfold. Please note that these predictions are based on nothing except this trend.

Brisingr has to accomplish two things. It has to finished the unfinished elements of The Empire Strikes Back and get part way through Return of the Jedi. Keep in mind, it doesn’t have to get through all of Return of the Jedi, because there is another book to do that with.

Unfinished from The Empire Strikes Back:

In captivity, Luke’s friends are used as bait to lure Luke to the city. Vader orders a carbon-freezing chamber prepared to freeze Luke, which will hold him in suspended animation for transport to the Emperor.

Actually, this basically is finished. If you accept that Katrina’s kidnap serves the same purpose, then the setup was completed in Eldest. Now we just have to wait for the dramatic rescue. We know the rescue is attempted from the sample chapter, already.

My Prediction: Katrina will be rescued safely, although this will have been a trap.

The idea of suspended animation is interesting, though.

My Prediction: Katrina will be poisoned somehow, to make her comatose.

New from Return of the Jedi:

Luke then returns to Dagobah to complete his Jedi training. However, upon arriving, he finds Yoda is dying. Yoda tells Luke that no other training is required, but that he will not truly be a Jedi until he confronts Darth Vader who, Yoda confirms, is Luke’s father. With his final breaths, Yoda tells Luke that “there is another Skywalker”.

I’m very tempted here to say that Oromis will die, although this seems contrived because Elves are immortal. However, given the penchant for the contrived exhibited in the past, I will make this prediction. This will also fit in with the trendy, “cool” idea of old mentors dying, like Dumbledore.

My Prediction: Oromis will die.

Further, Oromis will tell Eragon he has taught him all he could about magic, and that Eragon is a true rider. But he will have to confront his brother Murtagh.

My Prediction: Eragon’s training will be said to be over. He will be told to confront Murtagh.

Now, Arya isn’t Eragon’s sister, unless incest is to play a future role in the stories. However, Eragon’s mother is still shrouded in mystery.

My Prediction: Eragon’s mother, Selena, is still alive.

Obi-Wan explains that Vader truly did this in the sense of the dark side consuming Anakin’s mind, apparently destroying the good man who was Luke’s father and replacing him as Vader.

My Prediction: It will be revealed that Morzan wasn’t that bad of a guy, just that the dark side corrupted him.

With the help of C-3PO, whom the Ewoks believe is a god, they are able to forge an alliance with the forest creatures.

My Prediction: There will be some sort of furry creatures on the side of the Rebels.

On the Death Star, the Emperor tempts Luke to give in to his anger. A ferocious lightsaber duel erupts between Luke and his father…

I’m sure you are more than familiar with the whole events on that scene, if not look it up. Now, the final confrontation will be between Eragon and Murtagh plus Galbatorix. And, I’m about to violate a creed of fortune tellers. Never, ever, ever give detailed predictions. The vaguer they are, the easier it is to say they were right. Well, I can’t resist.

My Prediction: Eragon and Murtagh battle. Eragon wounds and defeats Murtagh, but doesn’t kill him, because Eragon is the better man and a true rider. Galbatorix appears and all but destroys Eragon with powerful magic. Murtagh can’t stand to see his brother in pain, and tries to kill the emporer. Instead, he dies.

I hesistate to say that the emporer will die here, because there is an entire other book still coming. I can’t imagine how there will be enough to fill another book with, but I guess we will see.

Also, somewhere in the movies, Luke Skywalker acquires a new lightsaber of a different color.

My Prediction: Eragon will receive a new rider sword, which will be even better than Zar’roc.

I’ve got some more predictions, but those aren’t purely based on Star Wars, so it would feel like cheating.

Note, you can see Shurtugal’s predictions. They bring up a lot of questions with obvious answers. So I’ll make an additional prediction.

My Prediction: Arya is the green dragon rider. Arya and Eragon get it on. So do their dragons. OR If Arya isn’t the green dragon rider, it will be a new and unknown but beautiful female. Arya will reject Eragon one too many times, and Eragon will fall for this new rider. Saphira will act smug and say, I told you she wasn’t right for you. Saphira and the green dragon will make monstrous love.

If you think I’m going to be wrong about someting, have your own prediction to add, or anything really, comment.

Comment [11]

In eight hours, I shall attend a Release Party, barely escape with my life, and emerge with a copy of Brisingr. At which point you can expect a spoiler riddled review, which I will stay up the entire night to write. Beat everyone else to punch, that it sucks, so to say.

Comment

View the spoiler free version

Brisingr, or, The Seven Promises of Eragon Shadeslayer and Saphira Bjartskular is the third book in the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini. I would like to note that at his point, he is 25, and not 15, so he will be allowed no exceptions from the Age Card. Nor will he receive any exceptions from the War Veterans Card, since he is not a war veteran. It is interesting to note that this book took three years to publish. So you might expect that, given this amount of time, the book is pretty good.

Your expectations are always wrong, when it comes to the Inheritance Cycle, unless you were expecting an obvious plot twist. Spoilers ahoy: the only plot twist in the book is that Brom is Eragon’s father. Just about every fan who has ever posted on the Inheritance Forums predicted this, showing just how inventive the series is. But more than that the plot points are predictable, the book suffers from a far larger problem. The plot points are few and far-between. Wikipedia’s plot summary) deems a mere 5 events worthy of summary. Approximately 1 for every 155 pages of this colossal beast. Further, one of them involves the dwarves, who just aren’t very interesting.

Now, the book doesn’t contain a lot of plot, but it sure has a lot of scenes. The problem is, you get the feeling this book was just a collection of scenes cobbled together. For example, Eragon randomly meets a hermit magician in an abandoned keep… and then, nothing. After helping the hermit prepare a meal, and listening to a convoluted rant, Eragon runs away. It leaves the reader wondering what the point was. This is not the only instance of this. There are enough to fill 784 pages. Each page leads you to wonder whether the story will go anywhere.

I only comment on the need of plot, because Paolini’s characters still struggle to be sympathetic. In books by masters, such as Anna Karenina we can tolerate hundreds of pages of characters sitting around and talking. But since the Inheritance Cycle has always been about its Bildungsroman epic fantasy quest, when the book stops supplying this, it stops supplying at all. Perhaps the reason Eragon was the most tolerable book of the three is that it stuck to the formulaic but comfortable Star Wars plot. Eldest and Brisingr lack the eventfulness, and so they fall flat.

Actually, there aren’t even enough random events to fill 784 pages. Paolini’s signature purple prose and poor descriptors fill close to a third of the pages. This was an area I had really expected Paolini to make great headway in. Writing style is something you undoubtedly can improve with time, and Paolini has had ten years to do it. He also has a professional editor to help him. But the writing really hasn’t improved, and the book is still filled with guffaw inducing lines. Paragraph long descriptions of common place things in the environment still fail to breathe life into Paolini’s lifeless Middle Earth. The great novelist Chekhov once said, “In the particular is contained the universal.” Paolini’s descriptions are void of those little details of description that stick with us. Instead he uses his favored vague adjectives and cliches to describe things, sometimes forcing as many as five adjectives into a single terrified sentence, begging for mercy.

In addition, the dialogue is still contrived. Characters make use of such ridiculous anachronisms as “partook” and “forsooth.” Even as a realistic old English dialect, the dialogue falls short, as anyone who has read Shakespeare can probably tell you. This is ignoring the simple fact that the conversations are unrealistic to begin with. In particular, one Urgal is compelled to blurt out his entire life story, as the reader dozes.

Perhaps the reader would doze less if the most potentially exciting scene in the entire series hadn’t happened off screen. As we can all recall, the “epic showdown” between Eragon and Murtagh in the end of Eldest had been a huge anticlimax. Well, guess what? The fight between Murtagh and Oromis happens off screen. That’s right. What could have been the coolest scene in the series doesn’t happen at all, as far as we are concerned. All we get is a report that Oromis and Glaedr are dead. Truly a masterful story teller. Or perhaps, writing another action scene was too much work. Brisingr is crowned by another triumphant anti-climax.

If you were one of the people who gave Paolini the benefit of doubt, and hoped he would improve, I’ll say this: he did improve, but not by much. And considering how bad the initial quality is, a slight improvement still places you in the “Cliche Fantasy Paperback” category. It’s disappointing that after such a long wait, the book just doesn’t deliver.

For a chapter by chapter break down of the failures, check here.

Comment [926]

View the spoiler version

Brisingr, or, The Seven Promises of Eragon Shadeslayer and Saphira Bjartskular is the third book in the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini. I would like to note that at his point, he is 25, and not 15, so he will be allowed no exceptions from the Age Card. Nor will he receive any exceptions from the War Veterans Card, since he is not a war veteran. It is interesting to note that this book took three years to publish. So you might expect that, given this amount of time, the book is pretty good.

Your expectations are always wrong, when it comes to the Inheritance Cycle, unless you were expecting an obvious plot twist. But more than that the plot points are predictable, the book suffers from a far larger problem. The plot points are few and far-between. Wikipedia’s plot summary) deems a mere 5 events worthy of summary. Approximately 1 for every 155 pages of this colossal beast. Further, one of them involves the dwarves, who just aren’t very interesting.

Now, the book doesn’t contain a lot of plot, but it sure has a lot of scenes. The problem is, you get the feeling this book was just a collection of scenes cobbled together. For example, Eragon randomly meets a hermit magician in an abandoned keep… and then, nothing. After helping the hermit prepare a meal, and listening to a convoluted rant, Eragon runs away. It leaves the reader wondering what the point was. This is not the only instance of this. There are enough to fill 784 pages. Each page leads you to wonder whether the story will go anywhere.

I only comment on the need of plot, because Paolini’s characters still struggle to be sympathetic. In books by masters, such as Anna Karenina we can tolerate hundreds of pages of characters sitting around and talking. But since the Inheritance Cycle has always been about its Bildungsroman epic fantasy quest, when the book stops supplying this, it stops supplying at all. Perhaps the reason Eragon was the most tolerable book of the three is that it stuck to the formulaic but comfortable Star Wars plot. Eldest and Brisingr lack the eventfulness, and so they fall flat.

Actually, there aren’t even enough random events to fill 784 pages. Paolini’s signature purple prose and poor descriptors fill close to a third of the pages. This was an area I had really expected Paolini to make great headway in. Writing style is something you undoubtedly can improve with time, and Paolini has had ten years to do it. He also has a professional editor to help him. But the writing really hasn’t improved, and the book is still filled with guffaw inducing lines. Paragraph long descriptions of common place things in the environment still fail to breathe life into Paolini’s lifeless Middle Earth. The great novelist Chekhov once said, “In the particular is contained the universal.” Paolini’s descriptions are void of those little details of description that stick with us. Instead he uses his favored vague adjectives and cliches to describe things, sometimes forcing as many as five adjectives into a single terrified sentence, begging for mercy.

In addition, the dialogue is still contrived. Characters make use of such ridiculous anachronisms as “partook” and “forsooth.” Even as a realistic old English dialect, the dialogue falls short, as anyone who has read Shakespeare can probably tell you. This is ignoring the simple fact that the conversations are unrealistic to begin with. In particular, one Urgal is compelled to blurt out his entire life story, as the reader dozes.

Perhaps the reader would doze less if the most potentially exciting scene in the entire series hadn’t happened off screen. Brisingr is crowned by another triumphant anti-climax.

If you were one of the people who gave Paolini the benefit of doubt, and hoped he would improve, I’ll say this: he did improve, but not by much. And considering how bad the initial quality is, a slight improvement still places you in the “Cliche Fantasy Paperback” category. It’s disappointing that after such a long wait, the book just doesn’t deliver.

For a chapter by chapter break down of the failures, check here.

Comment [132]

“He was laying on his back, legs folded at the knees, stretching his thighs after running further and with more weight than he ever had before—when the loud, liquid, rumble erupted from his innards.” (p. 72)

I can’t have been the only one who though Eragon was struck with a disastrous bout of diarrhea. I mean, it is reasonable, right?

“Finding food in that desolate place, however, was not only far more difficult, it presented him with a moral dilemma that he had hoped to avoid.” (p. 72)

You and me both, Eragon. I don’t want to hear about another one of these for three pages. Very long story short, Eragon decides that just this one time, he can kill a poor little animal and eat it. This from the guy who remorselessly incinerates thousands of the Empire’s soldiers. I love it. At least this scene is well written in that I get the sense CP really is a vegetarian. The description of revulsion at having to eat meat matches up nicely with my vegetarian friends’ descriptions. Bravo to Paolini to writing what he knows.

Time to impress Sloan!

““I am Eragon and far more. I am Argetlam and Shadeslayer and Firesword. My dragon is Saphira, she who is also Bjartskular and Flametongue. We were taught by Brom, who was a Rider before us, and by the dwarves and by the elves. We have fought the Urgals and a Shade and Murtagh, who is Morzan’s son. We serve the Verden and the peoples of Alagaesia. And I have brought you here, Sloan Aldensson, to pass judgment upon you for murdering Bryd and betraying Carvahall to the Empire.”“ (p. 78)

Eragon’s long winded speech fails to impress. But he does manage to learn Sloan’s true name. How convenient. But, oh no, not another moral dilemma. Whatever will Eragon do?

He will ask Queen Islanzadi for help, is what. And I actually like the Elves’ turn to the psychotic. Some humans go and chop down some trees, so they go all MURDER on the humans. Which results in Islanzadi talking to Eragon—while her hands are still dripping in blood. What the hell. This would be cool, if I didn’t think the Ents had done it before. Again, to CP’s credit, at least Eragon is creeped out. I like the direction CP is taking his elves.

Now that his conflict is resolved, Eragon goes to use his completely immoral ancient language stuff on another human! This should be good.

“You can’t do this,” whispered Sloan. Even in the starlight, Eragon could see the last remnants of color drain from his skin, leaving him bone white. “You don’t have the means. You don’t have the right.”
“I am a Dragon Rider. I have as much right as any king or queen.”

Don’t you see, Sloan? He is a dragon rider he can do whatever the hell he feels like. I always suspected Eragon had this feeling of entitlement, I just needed it confirmed.

Basically, Sloan’s punishment is that he can never see Katrina. Even we allow prisoners to see their family. Ah, unnecessary cruelty, all in the name of “poetic” justice.

Seeing Sloan understandably freak out, Eragon offers some hope. People can change their True Names. What was it that made them a True Name again? I think we can pretty reasonably expect Murtagh to change his true name in the future, just in time to be a good guy again.

Comment [20]

Introduction

If you aren’t familiar with National Novel Writing Month, go get familiar with it. Yeah, 50,000 words in a month. Sounds pretty daunting, right? My position is that not only should everyone attempt NaNoWriMo(National Novel Writing Month), but everyone can win it.

A little background here. I’ve successfully completed NaNoWriMo twice during very busy school years.

Why you should try it

Everyone should try NaNoWriMo. If they are interested in writing, that is. Writing is one of those things you can only learn by trying; it really can’t be taught, despite the best efforts of people. If nothing else, NaNoWriMo is more practice. And it is practice that is hard to get. It also helps us appreciate just how hard writing a good story is, but also how easy it is, in some respects. It really is just writing, but at a greater length than most people do.

Before NaNoWriMo

Starting NaNoWriMo actually begins far before November 1st.

Prepare your schedule

This is important. Before you get into November, you should make sure you have some time everyday in which you are absolutely free. Practice clearing this time. NaNoWriMo is a time sink, so you’ll want to prepared when it enters your life. I would recommend clearing a space each day to read a book at extended lengths of time, as practice.

Prepare your friends

NaNoWriMo is time consuming to the point that you might not have the time to do fun things you might normally do with your friends. So you’ll want to bring up that you’ll be doing NaNoWriMo as often as you can, to remind them that you will be busy. Do it as often and obnoxiously as you possibly can, and make sure they know exactly what you are getting into. And make all sorts of promises about how great it will be, and make sure people ask you to read it when you are done. Why do all this? Because midway in November, all your friends will ask you about it how your novel is going. And if you tell them you quit, they will hate your guts. So you better keep writing, kiddo, after bothering them about it so much.

Prepare an idea

Yes, NaNoWriMo is supposed to be about spontaneity, but I still find it helps to have some semblance of an idea before starting. The reason is this, it is awfully hard to come up with a coherent idea on November 1st, when all the pressure is on. And you definitely want to start NaNoWriMo ahead, so you have some breathing room if you get more busy later in November.

So my advice is this: if you’ve been keeping a thoughtbook, then find a promising idea and run with it, if not, then start thinking about an idea the first chance you get.

Having too much structure in place before NaNoWriMo begins can stifle creativity, so I don’t think you should outline, but you should think of a brief cast of characters. The characters can be very vague, just general temperament is fine. Then you should of three specific scenes you would really like to see these characters in. Think specifics in terms of the settings these scenes would take place. Now, arrange the scenes chronologically. There, you are done. I’ll explain more about this later.

Practice killing your inner critic

You know those “random” kids who are always yelling things like “cheese! toaster! cow! llama!” and generally being really obnoxious? Well, you should practice writing really “random” sentences full of nonsense like: “the middle aged libertine sipped his tequila from the bowl of a dismantled toilet, which only brought on his premature balding—and premature something else.” The point is that you should let your stupid ideas flow, without the interruption of your “respectability-filter” who just wants to rain on your parade, poop on your party, and generally ruin a good time.

Find other people who are doing NaNoWriMo

Failing that, convince other people to do NaNoWriMo. Having a group of insane people you can talk to about NaNoWriMo will vastly help. You need someone you can relate the pain to. Also serves the purpose of fostering encouragement when it gets low. Plus, competing with people in word races is great fun. The NaNoWriMo forums do a pretty good job of encouraging community, but you might want to look around for something a little smaller. ImpishIdea will be doing some sorts of NaNoWriMo related activities as it comes around, if you are interested.

Come November

Understand the numbers

50,000 words in 30 days is 1667 words a day. This is about 3 pages. Not an impossible thing to do each day, especially if you type quickly. At 50 words per minute, you’d be done in about half an hour. Of course, you are realistically pausing to stop, so you aren’t actually that fast. The pauses might half you speed, and then again. It should probably take you between 45 to 90 minutes a day to finish the day’s writing. This is extremely reasonable. It just requires the quickness of thought that we will learn to develop.

Seize the first day

November 1st is a big deal. Getting off on a good foot is pretty important, I think. Otherwise it is really easy to get behind. And also, writing for NaNoWriMo has to become a daily habit, so you’ve really got to start ingraining it at the start.

For some people the first day might be the hardest of all. I would recommend allotting extra time for the first time, because you’ve got to start the story, and that requires extra effort. Starting the story can be extremely hard, especially if this is your first attempt at writing a novel, and you are really self conscious about your writing. My first year I deleted my first paragraph more than seventeen times, before I finally settled on something. This was unfortunate, because I was under quota my first day. Hopefully it won’t be as painful for you. The first day is an important day in achieving the mental breakthrough of killing your inner critic.

If you really just can’t think of a story to start on the first day, then think back to that 3-scene outline I detailed in the previous section. Build the rest of your NaNoWriMo around this. The first scene on your list doesn’t have to be your first scene of the novel, but it could be the beginning. Likewise with the second scene not necessarily being the exact middle, and the last scene not being the climax. All this list does is give your story a direction if you get lost. Often, going from one scene to another, it is hard to figure out where to go next. When you run into this, you look at your list, and think. “I’ve already been to the first scene, but how do I get to the second scene?” And then the second scene can become your direction, and you can construct your scenes with the goal of leading to it.

Of course, if you have a strong sense of direction when you start writing, you can disregard this guideline completely, because if aiming for that second or third scene feels wrong to you, don’t do it. It’s all about doing what feels natural.

Learn to feel the flow

As you might have guessed, NaNoWriMo is too rushed to really have a coherent thought process. The point of it is to get your creativity on paper, to get to that point where the words simply fall out of your fingers onto the computer. This isn’t an easy thing to do, and there are several parts to it.

As I’ve touched on already, an important thing to do is to take that inner critic and push him down an elevator shaft. If he is still living, drop the elevator on him. There are some little things you can do to aid his death. Turn off spell check and grammar checking on your word processor. NaNoWriMo isn’t going to produce a polished and ready to publish novel, and you shouldn’t be trying to write one during the month of November. December is for editing. November is for writing. November is for putting a lot of poorly chosen words on paper. December is for correcting those word choices, fixing sentences until they shine, spacing paragraphs to conduce thought, and titling chapters. You should never look back on what you have just written, because that will trigger an urge to rewrite it, and you don’t want to get hung up over one sentences while time passes. (If you know the perfect sentence that will be a brilliant work of art, then I make an exception.) Just blow on straight ahead. You’ll have plenty of time for retrospection. And besides, retrospection is more valuable given time, anyways.

Create strong characters, and run with them. This is absolutely the most important thing you can get out of NaNoWriMo. Christopher Paolini said, “characters are born out of necessity”, but really, the opposite is true: the story is born out of the characters. If you can establish sufficiently vivid characters in the beginning, they will carry you through to the very end. The decisions the characters make will advance the story, and they will surprise you. The important thing to remember your role in the grand scheme of things. You are the story teller, nothing more. Narration and modern writing was born from prehistoric story telling. You are part of a grand tradition. Some might say that you are a god in your fictional realm, but I think that attitude is destructive, it makes you want to interfere. Interference brings you such sins as inconsistent characters. You should always let your characters act independently of whatever ‘plot’ you have in plan for them, and the result will be more organic, flowing, and convincing. The decisions your characters make will almost always surprise you. Two years in a row, I’ve had characters steal the story from me, and make it their own. You should welcome this surprise. No surprise for the writer means no surprise for the reader.

Ignore a lot of advice you hear

I’ve noticed that you hear a lot of really bad advice on the NaNoWriMo forums. Much of this concerns the ways you can cheat the system. One tip is to never use contractions. This is stupid because it actually slows you down when you are writing. If you are absolutely desperate, and think you need this cheap trick to increase your word count, do a find-and-replace of all contractions of the last day. But don’t even think about this rule while you are trying to write, because it interrupts your thought process.

Another piece of advice you’ll hear is to fill your pages with description, to meet your word count. This is also known as the Paolini school of writing, and should be avoided like the plague. You should not interrupt narrative flow with description, especially not in paragraphs. Obviously, description as appropriate is still needed to make a good story, but you should not be adding it to fill space. Besides, description actually takes a lot of time to come up with, so it is faster to fill your pages with other methods—like actually writing the story. NaNoWriMo is done the way it is for a reason, trying stuff like this to get around the word requirement defeats the purpose; the purpose is to force you to quickly express your ideas, and create a story.

This advice is usually given to people running out of plot midway through, and I understand that. I too ran out of plot after 30,000 words my first year. It’s just there are far more constructive ways to get those words. My recommendation is to add another character or Point-of-View if you ever run out of things to write. At least another character will only cause a discontinuity in your plotline, and not the practice of bad writing.

So, also, ignore the advice about writing dream scenes to get more words. This is just lame. Unless there is a specific reason your character would dream, and this fits in with his character and the story. In that case, please make the dream significant.

The Holidays are hard

Yes, Thanksgiving happens right smack dab in the middle of NaNoWriMo, and this can be hard to deal with. My best suggestion is to try and involve your relatives in the process, get them to give you feedback, character ideas, and so forth. If they are interested enough, they might tolerate you missing a meal to write.

Conclusion

I hope that gave you an overview of the process. I feel like I’m missing a lot, so maybe I’ll come back and update this as November approaches.

Comment [23]

So my friend from out of state, Kristofer Paoalilinei, happened to be in town last Saturday. So I thought, “Man, would anything be cooler than bringing him to crash a Brisingr release party?” Turns out, anything is just about everything, including watching ice melt and sitting in corn fields.

I brought along Kristofer Paoalilinei and Lord Snow to carry out shenanigans at the local Barns&Noble—I only say shenanigans because Kristofer Paoalilinei was speaking in an Irish accent the entire time. We were expecting crowds of people, with which we could debate the merits of the books and, if necessary, engage in a cagematch.

We were sorely disappointed be our prey opponents. The opposition entirely consisted of nine-year-olds, all of which were five years too young to understand why it was funny we brought a lightsaber—and pushed the Star Wars display in front of the Inheritance desk. None of them were capable of engaging in discourse with us, to decide the merits of the Inheritance Cycle through a battle of wits. And had we fought them in a cage, we would no doubt have been charged with assault of a minor, and third degree manslaughter.

That was a jolly disappointment. We were cheered up by the prospects of FUN ACTIVITIES which the B&N staff promised. These consisted of:

• Watching the Eragon movie. We tried to make funny comments, but the only people watching were the kids’ parents (for goodness sake, you’d think with age would come a semblance of taste) who glared at us for yelling, “Get away from me!” in sync with Saphira. Bunch of wet blankets, no wonder their children have no taste in literature.
• A trivia contest raffle for a hat. I maintain that we should have won this. Probably the staff disqualified us for being too witty and sarcastic even though we answered every question correctly. How old was Christopher Paolini when Eragon was first written? Fifteen, and we never stop hearing it. We even included all the little accent marks and umlauts in the stupid names of people, and they disregarded our efforts.
• An activity to build crossbows out of used pop-stickle sticks and rubber bands, with which marshmallows would be launched. This turned into a fun game of SHOOT THE CRITICS IN THE FACE LMAO I LOVE IT WHEN OUR PARENTS DON’T WATCH US BRATTY KIDS ROFL. And so marshmallows followed our footsteps. Of course, the dewbs didn’t realize marshmallows don’t hurt.
• The B&N staff realizes their store is a complete freaking mess, because there is marshmallow crushed into the ground everywhere. Nice going, geniuses. Fortunately, they offer up a clever plan. They will reward a free copy of Brisingr to however collects the largest wad of marshmellows. Calmly, us antis picked up all the marshmellows that were lying in a pile around us, and easily had the largest wad. But the nine-year-olds saw this, so they took new marshmallows out of the bag to add to their wads, combined their wads, then drew straws to see which of them would get the free book. Dirty little cheats. Of course, the B&N consented to this villainous act in the grounds of their store.

So after we got our copy of Brisingr we hightailed it out of there, because there was no conceivable reason to stay. Worst. Party. Ever.

Oh and did I mention there were only twelve people there in total?

Comment [29]

In the kingdom by the sea,
In the mountains mantled blue,
On frigid winter’s final day
Was born a man with but one task:
To kill the foe in Durza,
In the land of shadows.
Nurtured by the kind and wise
Under oaks as old as time,
He ran with deer and wrestled bears,
And from his elders learned the skills,
To kill the foe in Durza,
In the land of shadows.
Taught to spy the thief in black
When he grabs the weak and strong;
To block his blows and fight the fiend
With rag and rock and plant and bone;
And kill the foe in Durza,
In the land of shadows.
Quick as thought, the years did turn,
’Til the man had come of age,
His body burned with fevered rage,
While youth’s impatience seared his veins.
Then he met a maiden fair,
Who was tall and strong and wise,
Her brow adorned with Gëda’s Light,
Which shone upon her trailing gown.
In her eyes of midnight blue,
In those enigmatic pools,
Appeared to him a future bright,
Together, where they would not have
To fear the foe in Durza,
In the land of shadows.
So Eragon told of how the man voyaged to the land of Durza, where he found and fought the foe, despite the cold terror within his heart. Yet though at last he triumphed, the man withheld the fatal blow, for now that he had defeated his enemy, he did not fear the doom of mortals. He did not need to kill the foe in Durza. Then the man sheathed his sword and returned home and wed his love on summer’s eve. With her, he spent his many days content until his beard was long and white. But:
In the dark before the dawn,
In the room where slept the man,
The foe, he crept and loomed above
His mighty rival now so weak.
From his pillow did the man
Raise his head and gaze upon
The cold and empty face of Death,
The king of everlasting night.
Calm acceptance filled the man’s
Aged heart; for long ago,
He’d lost all fear of Death’s embrace,
The last embrace a man will know.
Gentle as a morning breeze,
Bent the foe and from the man
His glowing, pulsing spirit took,
And thence in peace they went to dwell,
Forevermore in Durza,
In the land of shadows.

As classic poetry

This is a terrible poem. Did you know? It seemed pretty obvious to me. So, obviously this poem is written in the Epic Narrative Style in the vein of Gilgamesh and Beowulf. Surprise, because Beowulf is an “influence” of Paolini’s.

Because of the genre, I can’t really take points off for not having rhyme. This is because Beowulf didn’t use rhyme for its metre. It used alliterative verse. From Wikipedia:

This is a technique in which the first half of the line (the a-verse) is linked to the second half (the b-verse) through similarity in initial sound. In addition, the two halves are divided by a caesura:“ Oft Scyld Scefing \\ sceaþena þreatum ”

So, let’s go looking for alliteration in this poem, right?

To block his blows and fight the fiend

That’s all I found. Wow. Just wow. You know, whoever it was that wrote Beowulf managed alliteration in every single line? Gee, turns out epic poetry is harder than Eragon figured.

As modern poetry

But let’s give Paolini the benefit of doubt, right? We will try and be fair here. Maybe he wasn’t going for the ancient form of poetry. Maybe he was trying some more modern poetry techniques. Let’s look around for some of that.

Rhythm

You can actually get a pretty nice rhythm going while reading this aloud—except that it is interrupted every here and there by really clumsy verses with the wrong number of syllables. It’s sort of frustrating really. Paolini almost got this right. It’s only appropriate that he should, because this is a poem that Eragon is chanting. Another problem is the second section throws all this out the window. What a waste.

Cadence

Cadence is the natural inflection of the voice when reading a poem out loud. I managed to read this in a flat monotone. So yeah, no cadence.

Dynamics

Dynamics are the volume changes when reading poetry. You know, when you can’t help but read the end of some lines softer, etc. That is dynamics. Once again, monotone. So no good dynamics here, either.

Phrasing

Paolini doesn’t make use of phrasing, so there is nothing to comment on.

Metaphors

There are no meaningful metaphors here either.

Details

This is a narrative poem, so an important point is to illustrate the characters. However, we never really get to know about any of the characters in this story, because there are no details. Everything is given in the broadest and most generic terms. All we know about the setting is that there is an ocean, and there are mountains. The female is described only physically, and not even in a way that gives us a good picture of who she is. The fight isn’t given in poem form, because Paolini is lazy and switches to straight up narration. Speaking of which, that narrative section is terribly jarring.

Overall, this is just a boring, generic epic fantasy “poem”. He is trying to be Tolkien, except Tolkien actually knew the art. I wish people would quit trying to be Tolkien.

Comment [105]

Eragon fell quiet and, conscious of the eyes upon him, ducked his head and quickly found his seat. He felt embarrassed that he had revealed so much of himself.

The elf lord, Däthedr, said, “You underestimate yourself, Shadeslayer. It seems that you have discovered a new talent.”

Islanzadí raised one pale hand. “Your work shall be added to the great library in Tialdarí Hall, Eragon-finiarel, so that all who wish can appreciate it. Though your poem is allegory, I believe that it has helped many of us to better understand the hardships you have faced since Saphira’s egg appeared to you, for which we are, in no small way, responsible. You must read it to us again so we may think upon this further.”

What is this passage? The one immediately following Eragon’s poem. Why does this undermine everything Paolini has written about his elves?

Up to this point, the elves have been described as graceful, immortal, wise, and intelligent beyond belief. This in addition to being gifted artisans. So what did they just do? To the elves, Eragon is a small toddler, barely worthy of their supreme intelligence, in the perspective of their immortal life spans. At least, he would be, if the elves weren’t some of the shallowest written immortals I’d ever encountered. So, now, the elves take this kindergartner’s work and put it in their immortal library of literary works. Given the elves can spend forever devoted to their poetry, I’m quite surprised they find any merit whatsoever in Eragon’s poem. Where are the Shakespeare’s, Poe’s, and Frost’s of the elves? What kind of “art” have the elves produced that Eragon’s little poem could be esteemed highly?

It’s possible that everyone was secretly snickering at Eragon, and that the Queen was just displaying courtesy while choking back her laughs, but this would be incredibly subtle. And Paolini hasn’t demonstrated subtle yet. So we can only conclude that Paolini was using the elves to congratulate himself on the poem he had Eragon write. Very good. If I wrote a book, I would be sure to have people praise me wherever I went. Might as well, right? My book, my rights. Too bad the reader also has a right to be disgusted.

And this line is just silly:

“Though your poem is allegory, I believe that it has helped many of us to better understand the hardships you have faced since Saphira’s egg appeared to you, for which we are, in no small way, responsible. You must read it to us again so we may think upon this further.”

Though your poem is an allegory? She probably means “because”, because an allegory is supposed to convey information. It’s not like in spite of the allegory they are able to better understand his blight. Although, let me tell you, that allegory must have been pretty damn deep, because I did not understand Eragon’s character better at all. Nor did I really get what events he was referring to, even though he says Durza’s name a million times. I guess it is a good thing the elves are sending this to their Department of Comparative Literature and Department of Literary Analysis to think upon further, because I need help understanding how this poem could mean anything besides a tired cliche.

It’s simply degrading to the elves’ art to include Eragon’s poem in it, and all Paolini has managed to do is make us think of the elves with skepticism.

Comment [65]

Two professional Brisingr reviews have now been released. One by the Washington Post and one by Salt Lake Tribune.

Washington Post

Salt Lake Tribune

So, one review is way better than the other. The Washington Post review tries really hard to say nice things about the book.

As an adult, I read “Brisingr” with a mixture of admiration for Paolini’s accomplishments and an awareness of the book’s flaws, which prevented me from being fully won over. But that’s hardly a slight. Had I read this novel when I was 13, it would have kept me up straight through the night. For that matter, I might have even stolen a few bits from it for D&D. And that’s a compliment.

Through out the review he talks about irrelevant stuff like D&D instead of actually focusing on the book. He mentions flaws, but never details what they are. What was the point of the professional reviewer again? Thanks for educating us on this book. Instead of being an actual review, this ends up as a glorified advertisement and plot summary. The author desperately wants to say this book is bad, I get the feeling, but he doesn’t.

So I feel a certain kinship with Christopher Paolini, whose first novel, “Eragon,” about a 15-year-old boy who discovers a dragon egg, may have had a similar genesis. While young readers devoured the novel, some adult readers cried foul. The teenage author, they argued, had stolen from fantasy greats like J.R.R. Tolkien and Anne McCaffrey, and even borrowed from “Star Wars.” Worse, much of the book was awkwardly overwritten.

Adult Readers? Excuse me, lots of young readers called foul too. It’s sort of fishy how this review doesn’t come down harder. But them, the author of the review wrote a book entitled Acacia: The War With the Mein which was published by The Doubleday Publishing Group a division of Random House. Guess you wouldn’t want to ruin your relationship with your publishing house by saying rude things about one of their most lucrative and badly written franchises, now would you?

The Salt Lake Tribune review, on the other hand, is not only shorter but more relevant. She is right on the money here:

Throughout “Brisingr,” the third book in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance cycle, characters are bone-tired from meandering through Alagaesia, frustrated at inaction and resigned to a fate not within their control.

As a reader, unfortunately, it’s easy to feel the same way.

Brisingr was originally slated to be the final book in Paolini’s trilogy; instead the story was chopped into two novels because Paolini thought he needed to wrap up too many plot lines to do justice to the story in one book.

If Paolini’s editors had been paying attention, they would have ripped out two-thirds of the story and used this volume to finish the series.

And also:

In the decade since the young author first penned a draft of “Eragon,” he hasn’t learned how to create characters that readers can relate to, or improved his awkward diction.

Yikes. Props to you Sheena McFarland. I think the Washington Post would do well to learn from the Salt Lake Tribune here.

Comment [15]

From this interview:

After replying to the text message, we found out that Rupert recently lost a bet to actor Robert Pattinson, who was once part of the Harry Potter cast in a previous film, and insisted that Rupert read the bestselling book. Rupert is now “stuck reading ‘Twilight’” and that Rob was just texting him to see how far along he was getting.

Rupert admitted he had only read the first five chapters of the bestselling book and we just informed him that there were three more books in the series. “No, really, are you serious? I thought there was just this one book?” Only now realizing he has to read three more, Rupert took his phone out and sent another message to Rob. By the looks of things, we can bet it wasn’t a very pleasant message.

Poor, poor Rupert. It was cruel of Robert to do something so inhumane. I can tell Rupert is regretting not agreeing to shave his head completely bald, or something similarly stupid. Now he is stuck reading four (although this part is sort of lame—four books, big deal) of those little horrors.

See what other nice things Pattinson had to say about Twilight

Comment [22]

THE EYE OF ARGON

by Jim Theis

I decided I couldn’t call myself a real critic until I had read through The Eye of Argon, which is consistently rated as the worst fantasy story ever written. That’s a tall order, considering the existence of certain other fantasy series. Anyways, without further ado, here it is:

The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked
climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the
Norgolian empire.

Well, isn’t this just a promising start? The description is already awful, and that was already two adjectives in the first sentence. ‘Barren’ is misspelled.

Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting
sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of
earth.

The hoof prints shone, if that makes any sense to you.

The tireless sun cast its parching rays of incandescense
from overhead, half way through its daily revolution.

I suppose the sun is tireless, it never seems to complain (I know I would). I suppose the sun might be incandescent (it’s also ‘incandescence’ not ‘incandescense’) if the light is actually from heat. Eh, physics. Also, CP uses this word five times…

Small rodents scampered about, occupying themselves in the daily
accomplishments of their dismal lives.

Please leave the small rodents alone. They have enough trouble without you defaming them.

Dust sprayed over three heaving mounts in blinding clouds, while they bore the burdonsome cargoes of their struggling overseers.

What, the dusts were struggling over the cargoes that belonged to their overseers? ‘Burdensome’ misspelled.

“Prepare to embrace your creators in the stygian haunts of
hell, barbarian”, gasped the first soldier.

I’m impressed, it’s really hard to speak while gasping, to say nothing of a sentence that long. Stygian should be capitalized as it is a proper noun.

“Only after you have kissed the fleeting stead of death,
wretch!” returned Grignr.

So. This could be an allusion to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and specifically Death… but would you really be kissing his horse? Also, he ‘returned’, how sassy.

A sweeping blade of flashing steel riveted from the massive barbarians hide enameled shield as his rippling right arm thrust forth, sending a steel shod blade to the hilt into the soldiers vital organs. The disemboweled mercenary crumpled from his saddle and sank to the clouded sward, sprinkling the parched dust with crimson droplets of escaping life fluid.

Even without the grammatical errors present, it is really hard to figure out what is going on.

Rivet – Verb – [-eting, -eted] – 1. to join by riveting

I don’t think ‘riveted’ means quite what he thinks it does… he probably meant ‘ricocheted’?

The enthused barbarian swilveled about, his shock of fiery red hair tossing robustly in the humid air currents as he faced the attack of the defeated soldier’s fellow in arms.

‘Swiveled’ is misspelled. Besides that, I’m sick of hearing hair described as shocks. Also, that hair is really moving around there—or would be, if robustly were at all the word he was thinking of.

“Damn you, barbarian” Shrieked the soldier as he observed his comrade in death.

‘Observed’ sounds like the wrong word here—might just be the connotations I have though.

A gleaming scimitar smote

Smote, also seen in Eragon: “Then the red fire smote her and she collapsed”.

a heavy blow against the renegade’s spiked helmet, bringing a heavy cloud over the Ecordian’s misting brain. Shaking off the effects of the pounding blow to his head, Grignr brought down his scarlet streaked edge against the soldier’s crudely forged hauberk, clanging harmlessly to the left side of his opponent. The soldier’s stead whinnied as he directed the horse back from the driving blade of the barbarian. Grignr leashed his mount forward as the hoarsely piercing battle cry of his wilderness bred race resounded from his grinding lungs. A twirling blade bounced harmlessly from the mighty thief’s buckler as his rolling right arm cleft upward, sending a foot of blinding steel ripping through the Simarian’s exposed gullet. A gasping gurgle from the soldier’s writhing mouth as he tumbled to the golden sand at his feet, and wormed agonizingly in his death bed.

Sigh, it’s really hard to comment intelligently about something this bad. One thing though, bucklers are made of wood, thus a sword would not bounce off.

Grignr’s emerald green orbs glared lustfully at the

Woah there! No need to get erotic.

wallowing soldier struggling before his chestnut swirled mount. His scowling voice reverberated over the dying form in a tone of mocking mirth. “You city bred dogs should learn not to antagonize your better.” Reining his weary mount ahead, grignr resumed his journey to the Noregolian city of Gorzam, hoping to discover wine, women, and adventure to boil the wild blood coarsing through his savage veins.

‘Coursing’ spelled incorrectly. This makes five.

One thing I like, this guy’s motivations are all really clearly laid out.

The trek to Gorzom was forced upon Grignr when the soldiers
of Crin were leashed upon him by a faithless concubine he had
wooed.

You mean ‘unleashed’, maybe? Otherwise I’ve got this amusing image of Grignr with walking a bunch of soldiers on a leash.

His scandalous activities throughout the Simarian city had unleashed throngs of havoc and uproar among it’s refined patricians, leading them to tack a heavy reward over his head. He had barely managed to escape through the back entrance of the inn he had been guzzling in, as a squad of soldiers tounced upon him.

‘Trounced’. Six. I can’t say I really blame the patricians.

After spilling a spout of blood from the leader of the mercenaries as he dismembered one of the officer’s arms, he

Yeah, he just pointless cuts off the limb of an already dead guy. Classy.

retreated to his mount to make his way towards Gorzom, rumoured to contain hoards of plunder, and many young wenches for any man who has the backbone to wrest them away.

I think we already know this about him as a character. Want to give him any more depth, or no?

Arriving after dusk in Gorzom,grignr descended down a dismal alley, reining his horse before a beaten tavern. The redhaired giant strode into the dimly lit hostelry reeking of foul odors, and cheap wine. The air was heavy with chocking fumes spewing from smolderingtorches encased within theden’s earthen packed walls. Tables were clustered with groups of drunken thieves, and cutthroats, tossing dice, or making love to willing prostitutes.

Just the place for me, he thought grimly.

Eyeing a slender female crouched alone at a nearby bench, Grignr advanced wishing to wholesomely occupy his time.

Wholesomely, yup.

The flickering torches cast weird shafts of luminescence dancing over the half naked harlot of his choice

After that description, I agree, they were weird shafts of light.

, her stringy orchid twines of hair swaying gracefully over the lithe opaque nose, as she raised a half drained mug to her pale red lips.

Lithe, opaque nose, you hear? I guess I wouldn’t want a harlot with a transparent nose either. Congrats on your good taste!

Glancing upward, the alluring complexion noted the stalwart giant as he rapidly approached. A faint glimmer sparked from the pair of deep blue ovals of the amorous female as she motioned toward Grignr, enticing him to join her. The barbarian seated himself upon a stool at the wenches side, exposing his body, naked save for a loin cloth brandishing a long steel broad sword, an iron spiraled battle helmet, and a thick leather sandals, to her unobstructed view.

Practical dress for one so often engaged in dangerous combat. Of course, we all know this is a cheap Conan ripoff so it figures.

“Thou hast need to occupy your time, barbarian”,questioned the female?

Thou hast need to use a butchering of Olde English? Olde English, also appearing in Eldest: “Thou art well-come to this city of Tarnag. By otho of Ûndin and Gannel, I, Thorv, son of Brokk, offer in peace the shelter of our halls.”

“Only if something worth offering is within my reach.” Stated Grignr,as his hands crept to embrace the tempting female, who welcomed them with open willingness.

We get it, she is slutty. Way to write female characters. Although I can’t say the male characters are much better.

“From where do you come barbarian, and by what are you called?” Gasped the complying wench, as Grignr smothered her lips with the blazing touch of his flaming mouth.

Again, speaking while gasping, impressive. She ups the ante though, she does it while being smothered. Also, that flaming mouth reminds me of some particularly over the top descriptions of Edward Cullen.

The engrossed titan ignored the queries of the inquisitive female, pulling her towards him and crushing her sagging nipples to his yearning chest. Without struggle she gave in, winding her soft arms around the harshly bronzedhide of Grignr corded shoulder blades, as his calloused hands caressed her firm
protruding busts.

… You can tell he was really getting into this scene. “Bronzedhide of Grignr corder should blades”, indeed.

“You make love well wench,” Admitted Grignr as he reached for the vessel of potent wine his charge had been quaffing.

Outside of Roguelike games where the command to drink potions is ‘q’uaff I’ve never seen this word used anywhere… besides in Eldest, that is: “The faelnirv was cold as ice as it ran down Eragon’s throat, stinging and smarting. He blinked as his eyes watered. After he indulged in a second quaff, he passed the bottle back to Orik, who seemed disappointed by how little of the concoction remained”.

A flying foot caught the mug Grignr had taken hold of, sending its blood red contents sloshing over a flickering crescent; leashing tongues of bright orange flame to the foot trodden floor.

Wait, flickering crescent? I don’t comprehend the imagery here. And again, misuse of the word ‘leash’ in some form.

“Remove yourself Sirrah, the wench belongs to me;” Blabbered a drunken soldier, too far consumed by the influences of his virile brew to take note of the superior size of his adversary.

Should really be “Remove yourself Sirrah. The wench belongs to me.” Or maybe what he thinks Grignr is his wench, and Sirrah had better get away from his big hunk of lovin’.

Grignr lithly bounded from the startled female, his face lit up to an ashen red ferocity, and eyes locked in a searing feral blaze toward the swaying soldier.

Grignr is offended that the soldier thinks he loves him, that braggart.

“To hell with you, braggard!” Bellowed the angered Ecordian, as he hefted his finely honed broad sword.

‘Braggart’. Hell, I lost track of the count again, and I’m a math major…

The staggering soldier clumsily reached towards the pommel of his dangling sword, but before his hands ever touched the oaken hilt a silvered flash was slicing the heavy air. The thews

Thews, as seen in Brisingr: “Eragon tightened his grip as he felt her mighty thews bunch underneath his legs.”

of the savages lashing right arm bulged from the glistening bronzed hide as his blade bit deeply into the soldiers neck, loping off the confused head of his senseless tormentor.

Well then.

With a nauseating thud the severed oval toppled to the floor, as the segregated torso of Grignr’s bovine antagonist swayed, then collapsed in a pool of swirled crimson.

Hehe. ‘Oval’ and ‘bovine’ are funny descriptors.

In the confusion the soldier’s fellows confronted Grignr with unsheathed cutlasses, directed toward the latters scowling make-up.

Make up? As in mascara?

“The slut should have picked his quarry more carefully!” Roared the victor in a mocking baritone growl, as he wiped his dripping blade on the prostrate form, and returned it to its scabbard.

Woah, who is the slut here? The solider you just killed, or the slut that was just hitting on you?

“The fool should have shown more prudence, however you shall rue your actions while rotting in the pits.” Stated one of the sprawled soldier’s comrades.

This is a very reasonable thing to say, all things considered.

Grignr’s hand began to remove his blade from its leather housing, but retarded the motion in face of the blades waving before his face.

Oh, I was actually expecting him to hack his way through the group, but this works too.

“Dismiss your hand from the hilt, barbarbian, or you shall find a foot of steel sheathed in your gizzard.”

Tell your hand off!

Grignr weighed his position observing his plight, where-upon he took the soldier’s advice as the only logical choice. To attempt to hack his way from his present predicament could only warrant certain death. He was of no mind to bring upon his own demise if an alternate path presented itself. The will to necessitate his life forced him to yield to the superior force in hopes of a moment of carlessness later upon the part of his captors in which he could effect a more plausible means of escape.

This sounds very similar to the ‘moral decisions’ Eragon often makes. In that, they are completely devoid of content.

“You may steady your arms, I will go without a struggle.”

“Ahem, now that I am more steadily composed, I take it upon myself to apologize for my hasty actions and become suddenly much more reasonable.”

“Your decision is a wise one, yet perhaps you would have been better off had you forced death,” the soldier’s mouth wrinkled to a sadistic grin of knowing mirth as he prodded his prisoner on with his sword point.

After an indiscriminate period of marching through slinking
alleyways and dim moonlighted streets the procession confronted a
massive seraglio. The palace area was surrounded by an iron
grating, with a lush garden upon all sides.

The group was admitted through the gilded gateway and Grignr
was ledalong a stone pathway bordered by plush vegitation

‘Vegetation’.

lustfully enhanced by the moon’s shimmering rays. Upon reaching

Everything seems lusty here.

the palace the group was granted entrance, and after several minutes of explanation, led through several winding corridors to a richly draped chamber.

Confronting the group was a short stocky man seated upona golden throne. Tapestries of richly draped regal blue silk covered all walls of the chamber, while the steps leading to the throne were plated with sparkling white ivory. The man upon the throne had a naked wench seated at each of his arms, and a trusted advisor seated in back of him. At each cornwr of the chamber a guard stood at attention, with upraised pikes supported in their hands, golden chainmail adorning their torso’s and barred helmets emitting scarlet plumes enshrouding their heads. The man rose from his throne to the dias surrounding it. His plush turquois robe dangled loosely from his chuncky frame.

‘Adviser’,‘corner’,‘turquoise’, ‘dais’, ‘chunky’. What the crap, golden chain-mail? I like that the guards are wearing the most expensive items in the room.

The soldiers surrounding Grignr fell to their knees with heads bowed to the stone masonry of the floor in fearful dignity to their sovereign, leige.

‘Liege’.

“Explain the purpose of this intrusion upon my chateau!”

“Your sirenity, resplendent in noble grandeur, we have brought this yokel before you (the soldier gestured toward Grignr) for the redress or your all knowing wisdon in judgement regarding his fate.”

‘Serenity’, ‘wisdom’.

“Down on your knees, lout, and pay proper homage to your sovereign!” commanded the pudgy noble of Grignr.

Fantasy logic: fat people are evil.

“By the surly beard of Mrifk, Grignr kneels to no man!” scowled the massive barbarian.

What’s with people referring to parts of their gods’ body parts in fantasy? I never hear people say, “by Thor’s mighty biceps!” although that could just be because nobody worships Thor anymore.

“You dare to deal this blasphemous act to me! You are indeed brave stranger, yet your valor smacks of foolishness.”

This guy reflects the sentiments of all the readers.

“I find you to be the only fool, sitting upon your pompous throne, enhancing the rolling flabs of your belly in the midst of your elaborate luxuryand …” The soldier standing at Grignr’s side smote him heavily in the face with the flat of his sword, cutting short the harsh words and knocking his battered helmet to the masonry with an echo-ing clang.

“Fatty! Real men like me are BUFF!”

The paunchy noble’s sagging round face flushed suddenly pale, then pastily lit up to a lustrous cherry red radiance. His lips trembled with malicious rage, while emitting a muffled sibilant gibberish. His sagging flabs rolled like a tub of upset jelly, then compressed as he sucked in his gut in an attempt to conceal his softness.

So Grignr’s face isn’t the only one that lights up brighter than Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Also, I’m not sure ‘malicious rage’ is right, I think ‘indignant rage’ might be more appropriate.

The prince regained his statue, then spoke to the soldiers surrounding Grignr, his face conforming to an ugly expression of sadistic humor.

We are all rooting for you, Prince!

“Take this uncouth heathen to the vault of misery, and be sure that his agonies are long and drawn out before death can release him.”

Our hero.

“As you wish sire, your command shall be heeded immediately,” answered the soldier on the right of Grignr as he stared into the barbarians seemingly unaffected face.

And this guy is an everyday hero.

The advisor seated in the back of the noble slowly rose and advanced to the side of his master, motioning the wenches seated at his sides to remove themselves. He lowered his head and whispered to the noble.

“Eminence, the punishment you have decreed will cause much misery to this scum, yet it will last only a short time, then release him to a land beyond the sufferings of the human body. Why not mellow him in one of the subterranean vaults for a few days, then send him to life labor in one of your buried mines. To one such as he, a life spent in the confinement of the stygian pits will be an infinitely more appropiate and lasting torture.”

Because he could escape is why! No, no, no, you fool.

The noble cupped his drooping double chin in the folds of his briming palm, meditating for a moment upon the rationality of the councilor’s word’s, then raised his shaggy brown eyebrows and turned toward the advisor, eyes aglow.

“…As always Agafnd,

Holy smokes. If you are having trouble naming a character who doesn’t matter anyways, please just don’t.

you speak with great wisdom. Your words ring of great knowledge concerning the nature of one such as he ,” sayeth , the king. The noble turned toward the prisoner with a noticable shimmer reflecting in his frog-like eyes, and his lips contorting to a greasy grin. “I have decided to void my previous decree. The prisoner shall be removed to one of the palaces underground vaults. There he shall stay until I have decided that he has sufficiently simmered, whereupon he is to be allowed to spend the remainder of his days at labor in one of my mines.”

Upon hearing this, Grignr realized that his fate would be far less merciful than death to one such as he, who is used to roaming the countryside at will. A life of confinement would be more than his body and mind could stand up to. This type of life would be immeasurably worse than death.

Oh please, we all know you escape in a few hours anyways.

“I shall never understand the ways if your twisted civilization. I simply defend my honor and am condemned to life confinement, by a pig who sits on his royal ass wooing whores, and knows nothing of the affairs of the land he imagines to rule!” Lectures Grignr ?

Lectures Grignr? indeed. This is from a guy who was just whoring in a bar, while sitting on his unroyal ass. And just because he isn’t fat doesn’t make him not a pig.

“Enough of this! Away with the slut before I loose my control!”

Am I the only one who is weirded out every time they use ‘slut’ to describe a male? As a pejorative term, I had only heard it applied to females. I guess this is his way of promoting gender equality, or something. Of course, it’s all offset by the way he makes every single female character (cardboard cutout) a half naked whore.

Seeing the peril of his position, Grignr searched for an opening. Crushing prudence to the sward, he plowed into the soldier at his left arm taking hold of his sword, and bounding to the dias supporting the prince before the startled guards could

Verb tense shift, ouch.

regain their composure. Agafnd leaped Grignr and his sire, but found a sword blade permeating the length of his ribs before he could loosed his weapon.

Wow, that was a foul sentence. The comprehensibility is really low if you try and read it as written. I think you can always tell the passages where he gets excited, because the writing drops markedly.

The councilor slumped to his knees as Grignr slid his crimsoned blade from Agfnd’s rib cage. The fat prince stood undulating in insurmountable fear before the edge of the fiery maned comet, his flabs of jellied blubber pulsating to and fro in ripples of flowing terror.

Fiery maned comet, tehe.

“Where is your wisdom and power now, your magjesty?” Growled Grignr.

‘Majesty’.

“Right behind you, Grignr.”

The prince went rigid as Grignr discerned him glazing over his shoulder. He swlived to note the cause of the noble’s

He really has trouble with ‘swiveled’.

attention, raised his sword over his head, and prepared to leash a vicious downward cleft, but fell short as the haft of a steel rimed pike clashed against his unguarded skull. Then blackness and solitude. Silence enshrouding and ever peaceful reind supreme.

I can’t help but add a ridiculous ‘bo-oi-oi-oi-oinggggg’ sound when he gets hit over the head.

“Before me, sirrah! Before me as always! Ha, Ha Ha, Haaaa…”, nobly cackled.

Ha, ha, ha, haaa… what was so funny again?

Consciousness returned to Grignr in stygmatic pools as his mind gradually cleared of the cobwebs cluttering its inner recesses, yet the stygian cloud of charcoal ebony remained. An incompatible shield of blackness, enhanced by the bleak abscense of sound.

He really likes all things Stygian. ‘Absence’.

Grignr’s muddled brain reeled from the shock of the blow he had recieved to the base of his skull.

‘Received’, although this is a mistake I often catch myself on.

The events leading to his predicament

The word predicament is one of the most overused and silly words in existence, if you ask me. I think it’s just because I’ve seen it a ridiculous number of times in Inheritance. You know, not everything you have to pause to think about is a predicament.

were slow to filter back to him. He dickered with the notion that he was dead and had descended or sunk, however it may be, to the shadowed land beyond the the aperature of the grave, but rejected this hypothesis when his memory sifted back within his grips. This was not the land of the dead, it was something infinitely more precarious than anything the grave could offer. Death promised an infinity of peace, not the finite misery of an inactive life of confined torture, forever concealed from the life bearing shafts of the beloved rising sun. The orb that had been before taken for granted, yet now cherished above all else. To be forever refused further glimpses of the snow capped summits of the land of his birth, never again to witness the thrill of plundering unexplored lands beyond the crest of a bleeding horizon, and perhaps worst of all the denial to ever again encompass the lustful excitement of caressing the naked curves of the body of a trim yound wench.

The barbarian waxes poetic—ah, the times near death experiences can do to a person.

This was indeed one of the buried chasms of Hell concealed within the inner depths of the palace’s despised interior. A fearful ebony chamber devised to drive to the brinks of insanity the minds of the unfortunately condemned, through the inapt solitude of a limbo of listless dreary silence.

I have to confess, I think it is a pretty cool idea. That hell isn’t buried so deep, and that one could simply dig into it. Anyways.

A tightly rung elliptical circle or torches cast their wavering shafts prancing morbidly over the smooth surface of a

No torch in this story is allowed illuminate a room in a typical manner.

rectangular, ridged alter. Expertly chisled forms of grotesque gargoyles graced the oblique rim protruberating the length of the

‘Chiseled’. ‘Protruding’? It still doesn’t make sense as protruding, so I’m very confused.

grim orifice of death, staring forever ahead into nothingness in complete ignorance of the bloody rites enacted in their prescence.

‘Presence’. I’ve noted a pattern, he really has trouble with words with an ‘ence’.

Brown flaking stains decorated the golden surface of the ridge surrounding the alter, which banked to a small slit at the lower right hand corner of the altar. The slit stood above a crudely pounded pail which had several silver meshed chalices hanging at its sides. Dangling at the rimof golden mallet, the handle of which was engraved with images of twisted faces and groved at its far end with slots designed for a snug hand grip. The head of the mallet was slightly larger than a clenched fist and shaped into a smooth oval mass.

Think you’ve described the altar enough?

Encircling the marble altar was a congregation of leering shamen.

Believe it or not, that should be ‘shamans’.

Eerie chants of a bygone age, originating unknown eons before the memory of man, were being uttered from the buried recesses of the acolytes’ deep lings. Orange paint was smeared in generous globules over the tops of thw Priests’ wrinkled shaven scalps, while golden rings projected from the lobes of their pink ears. Ornate robes of lusciour

Err, ‘luscious’? Some of these are just bizarre.

purple satin enclosed their bulging torsos, attached around their waists with silvered silk lashes latched with ebony buckles in the shape of morose mis-shaped skulls. Dangling around their necks were oval fashoned medalions

‘Fashioned’;‘Medallion’.

held by thin gold chains, featuring in their centers blood red rubys which resembled crimson fetish eyeballs.

‘Rubies’. Although I admit, plural forms in English are annoying.

Cushoning their bare feet were plush red felt slippers with

‘Cushioning’.

pointed golden spikes projecting from their tips.

Situated in front of the altar, and directly adjacent to the copper pail was a massive jade idol; a misshaped, hideous bust of the shamens’ pagan diety.

‘Deity’.

The shimmering green idol was placed in a sitting posture on an ornately carved golden throne raised upon a round, dvory plated dias; it bulging arms and webbed hands resting on the padded arms of the seat. Its head was entwined in golden snake-like coils hanging over its oblong ears, which tappered off to thin hollow points. Its nose was a bulging triangular mass, sunken in at its sides with tow gaping nostrils. Dramatic beneath the nostrils was a twisted, shaggy lipped mouth, giving the impression of a slovering sadistic grimace.

‘Slavering’, perhaps?

At the foot of the heathen diety a slender, pale faced female, naked but for a golden, jeweled harness enshrouding her huge outcropping breasts, supporting long silver laces which extended to her thigh, stood before the pearl white field with noticable shivers traveling up and down the length of her exquisitely molded body. Her delicate lips trembled beneath soft narrow hands as she attemped to conceal herself from the piercing stare of the ambivalent idol.

The only kind of female in this story, I swear.

Glaring directly down towards her was the stoney, cycloptic

Definitely not a word.

face of the bloated diety. Gaping from its single obling socket was scintillating, many fauceted scarlet emerald, a brilliant gem seeming to possess a life all of its own. A priceless gleaming stone, capable of domineering the wealth of conquering empires…the eye of Argon.

All knowledge of measuring time had escaped Grignr. When a person is deprived of the sun, moon, and stars, he looses all conception of time as he had previously understood it. It seemed as if years had passed if time were being measured by terms of misery and mental anguish, yet he estimated that his stay had only been a few days in length. He has slept three times and had been fed five times since his awakening in the crypt. However, when the actions of the body are restricted its needs are also affected. The need for nourishmnet and slumber are directly proportional to the functions the body has performed, meaning that when free and active Grignr may become hungry every six hours and witness the desire for sleep every fifteen hours, whereas in his present condition he may encounter the need for food every ten hours, and the want for rest every twenty hours. All methods he had before depended upon were extinct in the dismal pit. Hence, he may have been imprisoned for ten minutes or ten years, he did not know, resulting in a disheartened emotion deep within his being.

Thanks for the incredibly lucid explanation of time dilation. As a college student, this gets to be a relatively common occurrence.

The food, if you can honor the moldering lumps of fetid mush to that extent, was born to him by two guards who opened a portal at the top of his enclosure and shoved it to him in wooden bowls, retrieving the food and water bowels from his previous meal at the same time, after which they threw back the bolts on the iron latch and returned to their other duties. Since deprived of all other means of nourishment, Grignr was impelled to eat the tainted slop in order to ward off the paings of starvation, though as he stuffed it into his mouth with his filthy fingers and struggled to force it down his throat, he imagined it was that which had been spurned by the hounds stationed at various segments of the palace.

Sissy. When Eragon was trapped in a prison cell he knew his food was being poisoned, so he went without eating!

There was little in the baren vault that could occupy his body or mind. He had paced out the length and width of the enclosure time and time again and tested every granite slab which consisted the walls of the prison in hopes of finding a hidden passage to freedom, all of which was to no avail other than to keep him busy and distract his mind from wandering to thoughts of what he believed was his future. He had memorized the number of strides from one end to the other of the cell, and knew the exact number of slabs which made up the bleak dungeon. Numorous

‘Numerous’, perhaps?

schemes were introduced and alternately discarded in turn as they succored to unravel to him no means of escape which stood the slightest chance of sucess.

Yeah, because we’ve already established this is a really intelligent character, so of course we’d expect that he could think up a way our of prison!

Anguish continued to mount as his means of occupation were rapidly exhausted. Suddenly without no tive, he wasrouted from his contemplations as he detected a faint scratching sound at the end of the crypt opposite him. The sound seemed to be caused by something trying to scrape away at the grantite blocks the floor of the enclosure consisted of, the sandy scratching of something like an animal’s claws.

Grignr gradually groped his way to the other end of the vault carefully feeling his way along with his hands ahead of him. When a few inches from the wall, a loud, penetrating squeal, and the scampering of small padded feet reverberated from the walls of the roughly hewn chamber.

Grignr threw his hands up to shield his face, and flung himself backwards upon his buttocks. A fuzzy form bounded to his hairy chest, burying its talons in his flesh while gnashing toward his throat with its grinding white teeth;its sour, fetid breath scortching the sqirming barbarians dilating nostrils.

Yeah, he is terrified of a mouse.

Grignr grappled with the lashing flexor muscles of the repugnant body of a garganuan brownhided rat, striving to hold its razor teeth from his juicy jugular, as its beady grey organs of sight glazed into the flaring emeralds of its prey.

I guess in fairness, it was a ‘garganuan’ rat, and not a mouse like I had stated.

Taking hold of the rodent around its lean, growling stomach with both hands Grignr pried it from his crimson rent breast, removing small patches of flayed flesh from his chest in the motion between the squalid black claws of the starving beast. Holding the rodent at arms length, he cupped his righthand over its frothing face, contrcting his fingers into a vice-like fist over the quivering head. Retaining his grips on the rat, grignr flexed his outstretched arms while slowly twisting his right hand clockwise and his left hand counter clockwise motion. The rodent let out a tortured squall, drawing scarlet as it violently dug its foam flecked fangs into the barbarians sweating palm, causing his face to contort to an ugly grimace as he cursed beneath his braeth.

This passage made my stomach roil, and it’s not just because the subject matter is disgusting.

With a loud crack the rodents head parted from its squirming torso, sending out a sprinking shower of crimson gore, and trailing a slimy string of disjointed vertebrae, snapped trachea, esophagus, and jugular, disjointed hyoid bone, morose purpled stretched hide, and blood seared muscles.

What’s frightening is how lucid this actually is.

Flinging the broken body to the floor, Grignr shook his blood streaked hands and wiped them against his thigh until dry, then wiped the blood that had showered his face and from his eyes. Again sitting himself upon the jagged floor, he prepared to once more revamp his glum meditations. He told himself that as long as he still breathed the gust of life through his lungs, hope was not lost; he told himself this, but found it hard to comprehend in his gloomy surroundings. Yet he was still alive, his bulging sinews at their peak of marvel, his struggling mind floating in a miral of impressed excellence of thought. Plot after plot sifted through his mind in energetic contemplations.

More moping.

Then it hit him. Minutes may have passed in silent thought or days, he could not tell, but he stumbled at last upon a plan that he considered as holding a slight margin of plausibility. He might die in the attempt, but he knew he would not submit without a final bloody struggle. It was not a foolproof plan, yet it built up a store of renewed vortexed energy in his overwroughtsoul, though he might perish in the execution of the escape, he would still be escaping the life of infinite torture in store forhim. Either way he would still cheat the gloating prince of the succored revenge his sadistic mind craved so dearly.

Vortexed energy, the very best kind.

The guards would soon come to bear him off to the prince’s buried mines of dread, giving him the sought after opportunity to execute his newly formulated plan. Groping his way along the rough floor Grignr finally found his tool in a pool of congealed gore; the carcass of the decapitated rodent; the tool that the very filth he had been sentenced too, spawned. When the time came for action he would have to be prepared, so he set himself to rending the sticky hulk in grim silence, searching by the touch of his fingertips for the lever to freedom.

“Up to the altar and be done with it wench;” ordered a fidgeting shaman as he gave the female a grim stare accompanied by the wrinkling of his lips to a mirthful grin of delight.

The girl burst into a slow steady whimper, stooping shakily to her knees and cringing woefully from the priest with both arms wound snake-like around the bulging jade jade shin rising before her scantily attired figure.

We get it, she isn’t wearing much clothing.

Her face was redly inflamed from the salty flow of tears spouting from her glassy dilated eyeballs.

With short, heavy footfals the priest approached the female,
his piercing stare never wavering from her quivering young
countenance.

Hate the word countenance. Also, I hate piercing stares.

Halting before the terrified girl he projected his arm outward and motioned her to arise with an upward movement of his hand. the girl’s whimpering increased slightly and she sunk closer to the floor rather than arising. The flickering torches outlined her trim build with a weird ornate glow as it cast a ghostly shadow dancing in horrid waves of splendor over smoothly worn whiteness of the marble hewn altar.

Watch out girl, you’ll annoy him! Also, again with the weird lighting provided by the torches.

The shaman’s lips curled back farther, exposing a set of blackened, decaying molars which transformed his slovenly grin

Oh, I guess he meant slovenly back then, now I know.

into a wide greasy arc of sadistic mirth and alternately interposed into the female a strong sensation of stomach curdling nausea.

Alternately interposed into the female stomach curdling nausea AND …? I’m expecting two objects here.

“Have it as you will female;” gloated the enhanced priest as he bent over at the waist, projecting his ape-like arms

This guy can’t move his arms, only project them.

forward, and clasped the female’s slender arms with his hairy round fists. With an inward surge of of his biceps he harshly jerked the trembling girl to her feet and smothered her salty wet cheeks with the moldy touch of his decrepid, dull red lips.

Decrepit?

The vile stench of the Shaman’s hot fetid breath over came the nauseated female with a deep soul searing sickness, causing her to wrench her head backwards and regurgitate a slimy, orange- white stream of swelling gore over the richly woven purple robeof the enthused acolyte.

A book made me mouth puke. Amazing.

The priest’s lips trembled with a malicious rage as he removed his callous paws from the girl’s arms and replaced them with tightly around her undulating neck, shaking her violently to and fro.

Undulating, yeah guess which book it also shows up in? Brisingr: “Before them was a vast expanse of undulating grass, dotted with occasional stands of willow and cottonwood trees.”

The girl gasped a tortured groan from her clamped lungs, her sea blue eyes bulging forth from damp sockets. Cocking her right foot backwards, she leashed it desperately outwards with the strength of a demon possessed, lodging her sandled foot squarely between the shaman’s testicles.

Gasped a groan, instead of, you know, groan a groan. I like the refreshing candor with which he says the priest was kicked in the testicles. Much better than, “Roran lifted his spear above his head as if he were about to throw it and, when the soldier faltered, kicked him between the fork of his legs.”

The startled priest released his crushing grip, crimping his body over at the waist overlooking his recessed belly; wide open in a deep chasim. His face flushed to a rose red shade of crimson, eyelids fluttering wide with eyeballs protruding blindly outwards from their sockets to their outmost perimeters, while his lips quivered wildly about allowing an agonized wallow to gust forth as his breath billowed from burning lungs. His hands reached out clutching his urinary gland as his knees wobbled rapidly about for a few seconds then buckled, causing the ruptured shaman to collapse in an egg huddled mass to the granite pavement, rolling helplessly about in his agony.

This guy has the oddest ways of saying someone’s eyes bulged. Also, urinary gland… otherwise known as the prostate is located inside the body, close to the bladder. I would be extremely surprised if he were able to clutch at it.

The pathetic screeches of the shaman groveling in dejected misery upon the hand hewn granite laid pavement, worn smooth by countless hours of arduous sweat and toil, a welter of ichor oozing through his clenched hands, attracted the purturbed attention of his comrades from their foetid ulations. The actions of this this rebellious wench bespoke the creedence of an unheard of sacrilige. Never before in a lost maze of untold eons had a chosen one dared to demonstrate such blasphemy in the face of the cult’s idolic diety.

The girl cowered in unreasoning terror, helpless in the face of the emblazoned acolytes’ rage; her orchid tusseled face smothered betwixt her bulging bosom as she shut her curled lashed tightly hoping to open them and find herself awakening from a morbid nightmare. yet the hand of destiny decreed her no such mercy, the antagonized pack of leering shaman converging tensely upon her prostrate form were entangled all too lividly in the grim web of reality.

I didn’t comment on this earlier, but I don’t know what an orchid tasseled face is… bulging bosom, sigh… Haha, the grim web of reality.

Shuddering from the clamy touch of the shaman as they grappled with her supple form, hands wrenching at her slender arms and legs in all directions, her bare body being molested in the midst of a labyrnth of orange smudges, purpled satin, and mangled skulls, shadowed in an eerie crimson glow; her confused head reeled then clouded in a mist of enshrouding ebony as she lapsed beneath the protective sheet of unconsiousness to a land peach and resign.

‘Clammy’, ‘labyrinth’, ‘unconsciousness’. Ah, nothing like good old fashioned molestation, eh?

“Take hold of this rope,” said the first soldier, “and climb out from your pit, slut. Your presence is requested in another far deeper hell hole.”

Wow, stilted dialog.

Grignr slipped his right hand to his thigh, concealing a small opaque object beneath the folds of the g-string wrapped about his waist. Brine wells swelled in Grignr’s cold, jade squinting eyes, which grown accustomed to the gloom of the stygian pools of ebony engulfing him, were bedazzled and blinded by flickerering radiance cast forth by the second soldiers’s resin torch.

Yes, this man really is wearing a g-string. I’m currently trying to gouge out my mind’s eye for imagining this.

Tightly gripped in the second soldier’s right hand, opposite the intermittent torch, was a large double edged axe, a long leather wound oaken handled transfixing the center of the weapon’s iron head. Adorning the torso’s of both of the sentries were thin yet sturdy hauberks, the breatplates of which were woven of tightly hemmed twines of reinforced silver braiding. Cupping the soldiers’ feet were thick leather sandals, wound about their shins to two inches below their knees. Wrapped about their waists were wide satin girdles, with slender bladed poniards dangling loosely from them, the hilts of which featured scarlet encrusted gems. Resting upon the manes of their heads, and reaching midway to their brows were smooth copper morions. Spiraling the lower portion of the helmet were short, up-curved silver spikes, while a golden hump spired from the top of each basinet. Beneath their chins, wound around their necks, and draping their clad shoulders dangled regal purple satin cloaks, which flowed midway to the soldiers feet.

Too much description, nobody cares. This happens all the time in Inheritance. “His beard was brushed and curled, and he wore buskins of the finest polished leather with silver spurs mounted upon the heels, gray wool leggings, a shirt of purple silk that shimmered in the lantern light, and, over his shirt, a mail hauberk, each link of which was wrought of pure white gold. A long ermine-trimmed cloak embroidered with the insignia of Dûrgrimst Ingeitum flowed over Orik’s shoulders and onto the floor behind him. Volund, the war hammer that Korgan, first king of the dwarves, had forged, hung at Orik’s waist from a wide, ruby-studded belt. Because of his lavish raiment and his magnificent armor, Orik seemed to glow from within; to look at him dazzled Eragon’s eyes.”

hand over hand, feet braced against the dank walls of the enclosure, huge Grignr ascended from the moldering dephs of the forlorn abyss. His swelled limbs, stiff due to the boredom of a timeless inactivity, compounded by the musty atmosture and jagged granite protuberan against his body, craved for action. The opportunity now presenting itself served the purpose of oiling his rusty joints, and honing his dulled senses.

‘Atmosphere’. ‘protuberant’. Oil those joints, tinman!

He braced himself, facing the second soldier. The sentry’s stature was was wildly exaggerated in the glare of the flickering cresset cuppex in his right fist. His eyes were wide open in a slightly slanted owlish glaze, enhanced in their sinister intensity by the hawk-bill curve of his nose andpale yellow pique of his cheeks.

Just kill him already.

“Place your hands behind your back,” said the second soldier as he raised his ax over his right shoulder blade and cast it a wavering glance. “We must bind your wrists to parry any attempts at escape. Be sure to make the knot a stout one, Broig, we wouldn’t want our guest to take leave of our guidance.”

I was hoping that their reasons for binding Grignr would have been pretty well implied by now. This kind of clumsy explanation of actions is ridiculous… and everywhere. Like, in Eragon: “Spread out; hide behind trees and bushes. Stop whoever is coming . . . or die.” The whole ‘or die’ part should be an implied consequence, but noooooo, that would be too high quality for dialog.

Broig grasped Grignr’s left wrist and reached for the barbarians’s right wrist. Grignr wrenched his right arm free and swilveled

I’m just waiting for the one time this is spelled right.

to face Broig, reach- beneath his loin cloth with his right hand. The sentry grappled at his girdle for the sheathed dagger, but recoiled short of his intentions as Grignr’s right arm swept to his gorge. The soldier went limp, his bobbing eyes rolling beneath fluttering eyelids, a deep welt across his spouting gullet. Without lingering to observe the result of his efforts, Grignr dropped to his knees. The second soldier’s axe cleft over Grignr’s head in a blze of silvered ferocity, severing several scarlet locks from his scalp. Coming to rest in his fellow’s stomach, the iron head crashed through mail and flesh with splintering force, spilling a pool of crimsoned entrails over the granite paving.

Hahahaha, friendly fire. Is everything in this dungeon made of granite? It’s not really that common of a stone. These days it’s sort of expensive.

Before the sentry could wrench his axe free from his comrade’s carcass, he found Grignr’s massive hands clasped about his throat, choking the life from his clamped lungs. With a zealous grunt, the Ecordian flexed his tightly corded biceps, forcing the grim faced soldier to one knee. The sentry plunged his right fist into Grignr’s face, digging his grimy nails into the barbarians flesh. Ejaculating a curse through rasping teeth,

Ejaculated actually appears in Harry Potter. I have no idea what possessed Rowling to say that one of her characters ejaculated words, but she did.

grignr surged the bulk of his weight foreard, bowling the beseiged soldier over upon his back. The sentry’s arms collapsed to his thigh, shuddering convulsively; his bulging eyes staring blindly from a bloated ,cherry red face.

I’ve had enough of it with bulging eyes and red faces. This is starting to seem extremely stylized.

Rising to his feet, Grignr shook the bllod from his eyes, ruffling his surly red mane as a brush fire swaying to the nightime breeze. Stooping over the spr sprawled corpse of the first soldier, Grignr retrieved a small white object from a pool of congealing gore. Snorting a gusty billow of mirth, he once more concealed th e tiny object beneath his loin cloth; the tediously honed pelvis bone of the broken rodent. Returning his attention toward the second soldier, Grignr turned to the task of attiring his limbs. To move about freely through the dim recesses of the castle would require the grotesque garb of its
soldiery.

Yeah, that guy got murdered with a bone. You know, I have trouble believing a bone could penetrate a mail hauberk, but whatever. Shaking blood out of your eyes sounds dangerously painful.

Utilizing the silence and stealth aquired in the untamed climbs of his childhood, Grignr slink through twisting corridors, and winding stairways, lighting his way with the confisticated torch of his dispatched guardian. Knowing where his steps were leading to, Grignr meandered aimlessly in search of an exit from the chateau’s dim confines. The wild blood coarsing through his veins yearned for the undefiled freedom of the livid wilderness lands.

Coursing is another word that refuses to ever be spelled in the typical manner. Should be “Not knowing where…” unless he just wanted to explore a bit since he already knew where he was going.

Coming upon a fork in the passage he treaked, voices accompanied by clinking footfalls discerned to his sensitive ears from the left corridor. Wishing to avoid contact, Grignr veered to the right passageway. If aquested as to the purpose of his presence, his barbarous accent would reveal his identity, being that his attire was not that of the castle’s mercenary troops.

At least he acknowledges that the soldiers aren’t complete idiots, unlike in Inheritance where soldiers can apparently be tricked by the stupidest of stories.

In grim silence Grignr treaded down the dingily lit corridor; a stalking panther creeping warily along on padded feet. After an interminable period of wandering through the dull corridors; no gaps to break the monotony of the cold gray walls, Grignr espied a small winding stairway. Descending the flight of arced granite slabs to their posterior, Grignr was confronted by a short haalway leading to a tall arched wooden doorway.

Halting before the teeming portal portal

You know what? If something is a door, just call it a door. Eragon: “Seven dwarves stood guard on each side of the portal.”

, Grignr restes his shaggy head sideways against the barrier. Detecting no sounds from within, he grasped the looped metel handle of the door; his arms surging with a tremendous effort of bulging muscles, yet the door would not budge. Retrieving his ax from where he had sheathed it beneath his girdle, he hefted it in his mighty hands with an apiesed grunt, and wedging one of its blackened edges into the crack between the portal and its iron rimed sill. Bracing his sandaled right foot against the rougjly hewn wall, teeth tightly clenched, Grignr appilevered the oaken haft, employing it as a lever whereby to pry open the barrier. The leather wound hilt bending to its utmost limits of endurance, the massive portal swung open with a grating of snapped latch and rusty iron hinges.

Hey cool, leverage. Still, most of the work seems to be done by his bulging thews.

Glancing about the dust swirled room in the gloomily dancing glare of his flickering cresset, Grignr eyed evidences of the enclosure being nothing more than a forgotten storeroom. Miscellaneous articles required for the maintainance of a castle were piled in disorganized heaps at infrequent intervals toward the wall opposite the barbarian’s piercing stare. Utilizing long, bounding strides, Grignr paced his way over to the mounds of supplies to discover if any articles of value were contained within their midst.

Anytime the word ‘utilize’ can be used, so can ‘use’. Do what’s easy. And, oh yay, theft.

Detecting a faint clinking sound, Grignr sprawed to his left side with the speed of a striking cobra, landing harshly upon his back; torch and axe loudly clattering to the floor in a morass of sparks and flame. A elmwoven board leaped from collapsed flooring, clashing against the jagged flooring and spewing a shower of orange and yellow sparks over Grignr’s startled face. Rising uneasily to his feet, the half stunned Ecordian glared down at the grusome arm of death he had unwittingly sprung. “Mrifk!”

If not for his keen auditory organs and lighting steeled reflexes, Grignr would have been groping through the shadowed hell-pits of the Grim Reaper. He had unknowingly stumbled upon an ancient, long forgotton booby trap; a mistake which would have stunted the perusal of longevity of one less agile. A mechanism, similar in type to that of a minature catapult was concealed beneath two collapsable sections of granite flooring. The arm of the device was four feet long, boasting razor like cleats at regular intervals along its face with which it was to skewer the luckless body of its would be victim. Grignr had stepped upon a concealed catch which relaesed a small metal latch beneath the two granite sections, causing them to fall inward, and thereby loose the spiked arm of death they precariously held in.

With any luck the next one will get him.

Partially out of curiosity and partially out of an inordinate fear of becoming a pincushion for a possible second trap, Grignr plunged his torch into the exposed gap in the floor.

Aww, come on!

The floor of a second chamber stood out seven feet below the glare. Tossing his torch through the aperature, Grignr grasped the side of an adjoining tile, dropping down.

Glancing about the room, Grignr discovered that he had decended into the palace’s mausoleum. Rectangular stone crypts cluttered the floor at evenly placed intervals. The tops of the enclosures were plated with thick layers of virgin gold, while the sides were plated with white ivory; at one time sparkling, but now grown dingy through the passage of the rays of allencompassing mother time. Featured at the head of each sarcophagus in tarnished silver was an expugnisively carved likeness of its rotting inhabitant.

A dingy atmosphere pervaded the air of the chamber; which sealed in the enclosure for an unknown period had grown thick and stale. Intermingling with the curdled currents was the repugnant stench of slowly moldering flesh, creeping ever slowly but surely through minute cracks in the numerous vaults. Due to the embalming of the bodies, their flesh decayed at a much slower rate than is normal, yet the nauseous oder was none the less repellant.

Towering over Grignr’s head was the trap he released. The mechanism of the miniaturized catapolt was cluttered with mildew and cobwebs. Notwithstanding these relics of antiquity, its efficiency remained unimpinged. To the right of the trap wound a short stairway through a recess in the ceiling; a concealed entrance leading to the mausoleum for which the catapult had obviously been erected as a silent, relentless guardian.

Yawn, description.

Climbing up the side of the device, Grignr set to the task of resetting its mechanism. In the e event that a search was organized, it would prove well to leave no evidence of his presence open to wandering eyes. Besides, it might even serve to dwindle the size of an opposing force.

Sneaky bastard, I hope it goes off on your way out.

Descending from his perch, Grignr was startled by a faintly muffled scream of horrified desperation. His hair prickled yawkishly in disorganized clumps along his scalp. As a cold danced along the length of his spinal cord. No moral/mortal barrier, human or otherwise, was capable of arousing the numbing sensation of fear inside of Grignr’s smoldering soul. However, he was overwrought by the forces of the barbarians’ instinctive fear of the supernatural. His mighty thews had always served to

Here come the thews again.

adequately conquer any tangible foe., but the intangible was something distant and terrible. Dim horrifying tales passed by word of mouth over glimmering camp fires and skins of wine had more than once served the purpose of chilling the marrowed core of his sturdy limbed bones.

Yet, the scream contained a strangely human quality, unlike that which Grignr imagined would come from the lungs of a demon or spirit, making Grignr take short nervous strides advancing to the sarcophagus from which the sound was issuing. Clenching his teeth in an attempt to steel his jangled nerves, Grignr slid the engraved slab from the vault with a sharp rasp of grinding stone. nother long drawn cry of terror infested anguish met the barbarian, scoring like the shrill piping of a demented banshee; piercing the inner fibres of his superstitious brain with primitive dread dread and awe.

Stooping over to espy the tomb’s contents, the glittering Ecordians nostrills were singed by the scorching aroma of a moldering corpse, long shut up and fermenting; the same putrid scent which permeated the entire chamber, though multiplied to a much more concentrated dosage. The shriveled, leathery packet of crumbling bones and dried flacking flesh offered no resistance, but remained in a fixed position of perpetual vigilance, watching over its dim abode from hollow gaping sockets.

The tortured crys were not coming from the tomb but from some hidden depth below! Pulling the reaking corpse from its resting place, Grignr tossed it to the floor in a broken, mangled heap. Upon one side of the crypt’s bottom was attached a series of tiny hinges while running parallel along the opposite side of a convex railing like protruberance; laid so as to appear as a part of the interior surface of the sarcophagus.

Raising the slab upon its bronze hinges, long removed from the gaze of human eyes, Grignr percieved a scene which caused his blood to smolder not unlike bubbling, molten lava. Directly below him a whimpering female lay stretched upon a smooth surfaced marble altar. A pack of grasy faced shamen clustered around her in a tight circular formation. Crouched over the girl was a tall, potbellied priest; his face dominated by a disgusting, open mouthed grimace of sadistic glee. Suspended from the acolyte’s clenched right hand was a carven oval faced mallet, which he waved menacingly over the girl’s shadowed face; an incoherent gibberish flowing from his grinning, thick lippedmouth.

In the face of the amorphos, broad breated female, stretched

Given everything else, I can only assume he meant ‘breasted’. Do petite women not get any love in fantasy?

out aluringly before his gaping eyes; the universal whim of nature filing a plea of despair inside of his white hot soul; Grignr acted in the only manner he could perceive. Giving vent to a hoarse, throat rending battle cry, Grignr plunged into the midst of the startled shamen; torch simmering in his left hand andax twirling in his right hand.

Oh boy, here comes another fight scene.

A gaunt skull faced priest standing at the far side of the altar clutched desperately at his throat, coughing furiously in an attempt to catch his breath. Lurching helplessly to and fro, the acolyte pitched headlong against the gleaming base of a massive jade idol. Writhing agonizedly against the hideous image, foam flecking his chalk white lips, the priest struggled helplessly – - – the victim of an epileptic siezure.

Woah, was there a reason the priest had a seizure? Or was it just random? What?

Startled by the barbarians stunning appearance, the chronic fit of their fellow, and the fear that Grignr might be the avantgarde of a conquering force dedicated to the cause of destroying their degenerated cult, the saman momentarily lost their composure. Giving vent to heedless pandemonium, the priests fell easy prey to Grignr’s sweeping arc of crimsoned death and maiming distruction.

No doubt this was a whirlwind of comical flying limbs.

The acolyte performing the sacrifice took a vicious blow to the stomach; hands clutching vitals and severed spinal cord as hesprawled over the altar.

I fail to comprehend how someone could clutch their own spinal cord.

The disor anized priests lurched and staggered with split skulls, dismembered limbs, and spewing entrails before the enraged Ecordian’s relentless onslaught. The howles of the maimed and dying reverberated against the walls of the tiny chamber; a chorus of hell frought despair; as the granite floor ran red with blood. The entire chamber was encompassed in the heat of raw savage butchery as Grignr luxuriated in the grips of a primitive, beastly blood lust.

Let me revise my statement, it was a hurricane of comical flying limbs and blood.

Presently all went silenet save for the ebbing groans of the sinking shaman and Grignr’s heaving breath accompanied by several gusty curses. The well had run dry. No more lambs remained for the slaughter.

He cut them all off. Four for every person. He had this sort of OCD where he can’t allow anyone to own limbs.

The rampaging stead of death having taken of Grignr for the moment, left the barbarian free to the exploitation of his other perusials. Towering over his head was the misshaped image of the cult’s hideous diety – - – Argon. The fantastic size of the idol in consideration of its being of pure jade was enough to cause the senses of any man to stagger and reel, yet thus was not the case for the behemoth. he had paid only casual notice to this incredible fact, while riviting the whole of his attention upon the jewel protruding from the idol’s sole socket; its masterfully cut faucets emitting blinding rays of hypnotising beauty. After all, a man cannot slink from a heavily guarded palace while burdened down by the intense bulk of a squatting statue, providing of course that the idol can even be hefted, which in fact was beyond the reaches of Grignr’s coarsing stamina. On the other hand, the jewel, gigantic as it was, would not present a hinderence of any mean concern.

“Help me … please … I can make it well worth your while,” pleaded a soft, anguish strewn voice wafting over Grignr’s shoulders as he plucked the dull red emerald from its roots. Turning, Grignr faced the female that had lured him into this blood bath, but whom had become all but forgotten in the heat of the battle.

Looking for an attentive mate? This isn’t the guy.

“You”; ejaculated the Ecordian in a pleased tone. “I though that I had seen the last of you at the tavern, but verilly I was mistaken.” Grignr advanced into the grips of the female’s entrancing stare, severing the golden chains that held her captive upon the altars highly polished face of ornamental limestone.

Ejaculated in this context is horrific.

As Grignr lifted the girl from the altar, her arms wound dexterously about his neck; soft and smooth against his harsh exterior. “Art thou pleased that we have chanced to meet once again?” Grignr merely voiced an sighed grunt, returning the damsels embrace while he smothered her trim, delicate lips between the coarsing protrusions of his reeking maw.

It’s still spelled ‘coursing’, no the English language has not changed its spelling. Also, apparently it isn’t rape if the barbarian forces himself on you. Only if some priests do.

“Let us take leave of this retched chamber.” Stated Grignr as he placed the female upon her feet. She swooned a moment, causing Grignr to giver her support then regained her stance. “Art thou able to find your way through the accursed passages of this castle? Mrifk! Every one of the corridors of this damned place are identical.”

Let us take leave of this retched book. No really, I’m running out of comments to make, and my stamina is really suffering.

“Aye; I was at one time a slave of prince Agaphim. His clammy touch sent a sour swill through my belly, but my efforts reaped a harvest. I gained the pig’s liking whereby he allowed me the freedom of the palace. It was through this means that I eventually managed escape at the western gate. His trust found him with a dagger thrust his ribs,” the wench statedwhimsicoracally.

Whimsicoracally. I’ve not met a person who could state things in quite that way.

“What were you doing at the tavern whence I discovered you?” asked Grignr as he lifted the female through the opening into the mausoleum.

Quite obviously she was whoring herself out.

“I had sought to lay low from the palace’s guards as they conducted their search for me. The tavern was seldom frequented by the palace guards and my identity was unknown to the common soldiers. It was through the disturbance that you caused that the palace guards were attracted to the tavern. I was dragged away shortly after you were escorted to the palace.” “What are you called by female?”

Not sensible enough to find another tavern after the disturbance… ah, common sense, how fleeting you are in fantasy.

“Carthena, daughter of Minkardos, Duke of Barwego, whose lands border along the northwestern fringes of Gorzom. I was paid as homage to Agaphim upon his thirty-eighth year,” huskedthe femme!

Husked the femme!! I have no idea why that merited an exclamation at all.

“And I am called a barbarian!” Grunted Grignr in a disgusted tone!

Again, why was this so important to require an exclamation?

“Aye! The ways of our civilization are in many ways warped and distorted, but what is your calling,” she queried, bustily? “Grignr of Ecordia.”

She really, uh, used that bust of hers in the query. What the hell.

“Ah, I have heard vaguely of Ecordia. It is the hill country to the far east of the Noregolean Empire. I have also heard Agaphim curse your land more than once when his troops were routed in the unaccustomed mountains and gorges.” Sayeth she.

“Aye. My people are not tarnished by petty luxuries and baubles. They remain fierce and unconquerable in their native climes.” After reaching the hidden panel at the head of the stairway, Grignr was at a loss in regard to its operation. His fiercest heaves were as pebbles against burnished armour! Carthena depressed a small symbol included within the elaborate design upon the panel whereopen it slowly slid into a cleft in the wall. “How did you come to be the victim of those crazed shamen?” Quested Grignr as he escorted Carthena through the piles of rummage on the left side of the trap.

Blahblahblah. I won’t be interested in your conversation when you continue to be an unlikable oaf.

“By Agaphim’s orders I was thrust into a secluded cell to await his passing of sentence. By some means, the Priests of Argon acquired a set of keys to the cell. They slew the guard placed over me and abducted me to the chamber in which you chanced to come upon the scozsctic sacrifice. Their hell-spawned cult demands a sacrifice once every three moons upon its full journey through the heavens. They were startled by your unannounced appearance through the fear that you had been sent by Agaphim. The prince would surely have submitted them to the most ghastly of tortures if he had ever discovered their unfaithfulness to Sargon, his bastard diety. Many of the partakers of the ritual were high nobles and high trustees of the inner palace; Agaphim’s pittiless wrath would have been unparalled.”

Amazingly well spoken for some random whore, but I guess she is the daughter of a noble. Still, I have no idea how she knows so much about this religion.

“They have no more to fear of Agaphim now!” Bellowed Grignr in a deep mirthful tome; a gleeful smirk upon his face. “I have seen that they were delivered from his vengence.”

Engrossed by Carthena’s graceful stride and conversation Grignr failed to take note of the footfalls rapidly approaching behind him. As he swung aside the arched portal linking the chamber with the corridors beyond, a maddened, blood lusting screech reverberated from his ear drums. Seemingly utilizing the speed of thought, Grignr swiveled to face his unknown foe. With gaping eyes and widened jaws, Grignr raised his axe above his surly mein; but he was too late.

Did he die? Did he die? Oh, I hope he died! What a cliffhanger.

With wobbling knees and swimming head, the priest that had lapsed into an epileptic siezure rose unsteadily to his feet. While enacting his choking fit in writhing agony, the shaman was overlooked by Grignr. The barbarian had mistaken the siezure for the death throes of the acolyte, allowing the priest to avoid his
stinging blade.

Should have chopped off all his limbs, I guess.

The sight that met the priests inflamed eyes nearly served to sprawl him upon the floor once more. The sacrificial sat it grim, blood splattered silence all around him, broken only by the occasional yelps and howles of his maimed and butchered fellows. Above his head rose the hideous idol, its empty socket holding the shaman’s ifurbished infuriated gaze. His eyes turned to a stoney glaze with the realization of the pillage and blasphemy. Due to his high succeptibility following the siezure, the priest was transformed into a raving maniac bent soley upon reaking vengeance. With lips curled and quivering, a crust of foam dripping from them, the acolyte drew a long, wicked looking jewel hilted scimitar from his silver girdle and fled through the aperature in the ceiling uttering a faintly perceptible ceremonial jibberish.

Dear god, so wordy. Let me sum it up for “He was pissed”.

A sweeping scimitar swung towards Grignr’s head in a shadowed blur of motion. With Axe raised over his head, Grignr prepared to parry the blow, while gaping wideeyed in open mouthed perplexity. Suddenly a sharp snap resounded behind the frothing shaman. The scimitar, halfway through its fatal sweep, dropped from a quivering nerveless hand, clattering harmlessly to the stoneage. Cutting his screech short with a bubbling, red mouthed gurgle, the lacerated acolyte staggered under the pressure of the released spring-board. After a moment of hopeless struggling, the shaman buckled, sprawling face down in a widening pool of bllod and entrails, his regal purple robe blending enhancingly with the swirling streams of crimson.

He’s not dead. This is the first time a story besides A Song for Lya has made me cry. Amazing.

“Mrifk! I thought I had killed the last of those dogs;” muttered Grignr in a half apathetic state.

I could’ve have sworn Mrifk was a dwarven god in some other series…

“Nay Grignr. You doubtless grew careless while giving vent to your lusts. But let us not tarry any long lest we over tax the fates. The paths leading to freedom will soon be barred. The wretch’s crys must certainly have attracted unwanted attention,” the wench mused.

Thanks, Ensign Obvious.

“By what direction shall we pursue our flight?”

“Up that stair and down the corridor a short distance is the concealed enterance to a tunnel seldom used by others than the prince, and known to few others save the palace’s royalty. It is used mainly by the prince when he wishes to take leave of the palace in secret. It is not always in the Prince’s best interests to leave his chateau in public view. Even while under heavy guard he is often assaulted by hurtling stones and rotting fruits. The commoners have little love for him.” lectured the nerelady!

Yay, too bad we don’t care.

“It is amazing that they would ever have left a pig like him become their ruler. I should imagine that his people would rise up and crucify him like the dog he is.”

Actually, this amazes me about US politics, but I won’t get into that here.

“Alas, Grignr, it is not as simple as all that. His soldiers are well paid by him. So long as he keeps their wages up they will carry out his damned wished. The crude impliments of the commonfolk would never stand up under an onslaught of forged blades and protective armor; they would be going to their own slaughter,” stated Carthena to a confused, but angered Grignr as they topped the stairway.

Welcome to the real world, you’ve been hiding under that rock for quite some time now, there are some things you should know…

“Yet how can they bear to live under such oppression? I would sooner die beneath the sword than live under such a dog’s command.” added Grignr as the pair stalked down the hall in the direction opposite that in which Grignr had come.

“But all men are not of the same mold that you are born of, they choose to live as they are so as to save their filthy necks from the chopping block.” Returned Carthena in a disgusted tone as she cast an appiesed glance towards the stalwart figure at her side whose left arm was wound dextrously about her slim waist; his slowly waning torch casting their images in intermingling wisps as it dangled from his left hand.

Sigh. This is why authors should not try to moralize in their stories. It just comes off as stupid.

Presently Carthena came upon the panel, concealed amonst the other granite slabs and discernable only by the burned out cresset above it. “As I push the cresset aside push the panel inwards.” Catrhena motioned to the panel she was refering to and twisted the cresset in a counterclockwise motion. Grignr braced his right shoulder against the walling, concentrating the force of his bulk against it. The slab gradually swung inward with a slight grating sound. Carthena stooped beneath Grignr’s corded arms and crawled upon all fours into the passage beyond. Grignr followed after easing the slab back into place.

Yay, secret passages!

Winding before the pair was a dark musty tunnel, exhibiting tangled spider webs from it ceiling to wall and an oozing, sickly slime running lazily upon its floor.

I have no idea how this would happen.

Hanging from the chipped wall upon GrignR’s right side was a half mouldered corpse, its grey flacking arms held in place by rusted iron manacles. Carthena flinched back into Grignr’s arms at sight of the leering set in an ugly distorted grimmace; staring horribly at her from hollow gaping sockets.

The janitor has been on vacation for some time now.

“This alcove must also be used by Agaphim as a torture chamber. I wonder how many of his enemies have disappeared into these haunts never to be heard from again,” pondered the hulking brute.

Words that do not belong together: ‘pondered’, ‘hulking’, ‘brute’.

“Let us flee before we are also caught within Agaphim’s ghastly clutches. The exit from this tunnel cannot be very far from here!” Said Carthena with a slight sob to her voice, as she sagged in Grignr’s encompasing embrace.

Relax woman, you are with an unstoppable juggernaut of implausible dissection.

“Aye; It will be best to be finished with this corridor as soon as it is possible. But why do you flinch from the sight of death so? Mrift! You have seen much death this day without exhibiting such emotions.” Exclaimed Grignr as he led her trembling form along the dingy confines.

“—-The man hanging from the wall was Doyanta. He had committed the folly of showing affections for me in front of Agaphim —- he never meant any harm by his actions!” At this Carthena broke into a slow steady whimpering, chokking her voice with gasping sobs. “There was never anything between us yet Agaphim did this to him! The beast! May the demons of Hell’s deepest haunts claw away at his wretched flesh for this mercilessact!” she prayed.

Woah, character development. A little late now, but whatever.

“I detect that you felt more for this fellow than you wish to let on … but enough of this, We can talk of such matters after we are once more free to do so.” With this Grignr lifted the grieved female to her feet and strode onward down the corridor, supporting the bulk of her weight with his surging left arm.

Give me a break, why would you care? We all know you just want to impregnate her in a seedy hotel room and leave.

Presently a dim light was perceptibly filtering into the tunnel, casting a dim reddish hue upon the moldy wall of the passage’s grim confines. Carthena had ceased her whimpering and partially regained her composure. “The tunnel’s end must be nearing. Rays of sunlight are beginning to seep into …”

Grignr clameed his right hand over Carthena’s mouth and with a slight struggle pulled her over to the shadows at the right hand wall of the path, while at the same time thrusting this torch beneath an overhanging stone to smother its flickering rays. “Be silent; I can hear footfalls approaching through the tunnel;” growled Grignr in a hushed tone.

“All that you hear are the horses corraled at the far end of the tunnel. That is a further sign that we are nearing our goal.” She stated!

This woman has an amazing mouth. It can speak while gasping, groan while gasping, and speak while her mouth is in a death clamp from Mr. Barbarian. She stated! indeed.

“All that you hear is less than I hear! I heard footsteps coming towards us. Silence yourself that we may find out whom we are being brought into contact with. I doubt that any would have thought as yet of searching this passage for us. The advantage of surprize will be upon our side.” Grignr warned.

Carthena cast her eyes downward and ceased any further pursuit towards conversation, an irritating habit in which she had gained an amazing proficiency.

Quiet Lois, men are talking. Okay, so Family Guy references stopped being funny when Family Guy stopped being funny. Sorry.

Two figures came into the pairs view, from around a turn in the tunnel. They were clothed in rich luxuriant silks and rambling o on in conversation while ignorant of their crouching foes waiting in an ambush ahead.

“…That barbarian dog is cringing beneath the weight of the lash at this moment sire. He shall cause no more disturbance.”

Sigh, what a convenient thing to say.

“Aye, and so it is with any who dare to cross the path of Sargon’s chosen one.” said the 2nd man.

“But the peasants are showing signs of growing unrest. They complain that they cannot feet their families while burdened with your taxes.”

“I shall teach those sluts the meaning of humility! Order an immediate increase upon their taxes. They dare to question my sovereign authority, Ha-a, they shall soon learn what true oppression can be. I will … “

Now, I haven’t met any despots, but I’m almost sure this isn’t how they think. Not at all.

A shodowed bulk leapt from behind a jutting promontory as it brought down a double edged axe with the spped of a striking thought.

Speed of a striking thought. So what he means here is an extremely slow speed, given the kinds of characters we are dealing with.

One of the nobles sagged lifeless to the ground, skull split to the teeth.

Quite a blow. As you’ll observe, there was no brain inside.

Grignr gasped as he observed the bisected face set in its leering death agonies. It was Agafnd! The dead mans comrade having recovered from his shock drew a jewel encrusted dagger from beneath the folds of his robe and lunged toward the barbarians back. Grignr spun at the sound from behind and smashed down his crimsoned axe once more. His antagonist lunged howling to a stream of stagnent green water, grasping a spouting stump that had once been a wrist. Grignr raised his axe over his head and prepaired to finish the incomplete job, but was detered half way through his lunge by a frenzied screech from behind.

These fights sure are convoluted. And Grignr is apparently some sort of glass canon of doom, because the moment any scamp tries to jump on him, he is in big trouble.

Carthena leapt to the head of the writhing figure, plunging a smoldering torch into the agonized face. The howls increased in their horrid intensity, stifled by the sizzling of roasting flesh, then died down until the man was reduced to a blubbering mass of squirming, insensate flesh.

A blubbering mass? Good gracious, this person isn’t made of rubber, how did you melt him completely?

Grignr advance to Carthena’s side wincing slightly from the putrid aroma of charred flesh that rose in a puff of thick white smog throughout the chamber. Carthena reeled slightly, staring dasedly downward at her gruesome handywork. “I had to do it … it was Agaphim … I had to, “ she exclaimed!

It’s not like any of the characters in this story know what regret is.

“Sargon should be more carful of his right hand men.” Added Grignr, a smug grin upon his lips. “But to hell with Sargon for now, the stench is becoming bothersome to me.” With that Grignr grasped Carthena around the waist leading her around the bend in the cave and into the open.

People this smug should be thrown off cliffs. But since we know that can’t kill people, we should then climb down the cliff, cut off all their limbs, lock the limbs in separate chests, and then throw each chest into the center of a different sun. You can never be too cautious when killing off improbably heroes.

A ball of feral red was rising through the mists of the eastern horizon, disipating the slinking shadows of the night.

Good news, Christopher. You aren’t the only one who struggles to describe the sun! “The sun rose the next morning with a glorious conflagration of pink and yellow”

A coral stood before the pair, enclosing two grazing mares. Grignr reached into a weighted down leather pouch dangling at his side and drew forth the scintillant red emerald he had obtained from the bloated idol. Raising it toward the sun he said, “We shall do well with bauble, eh!”

Carthena gaped at the gem gasping in a terrified manner “The eye of Argon, Oh! Kalla!” At this the gem gave off a blinding glow, then dribbled through Grignr’s fingers in a slimy red ooze. Grignr stepped back, pushing Carthena behind him. The droplets of slime slowly converged into a pulsating jelly-like mass. A single opening transfixed the blob, forminf into a leechlike maw.

What?

Then the hideous transgressor of nature flowed towards Grignr, a trail of greenish slime lingering behind it. The single gap puckered repeatedly emitting a ghastly sucking sound.

Grignr spread his legs into a battle stance, steeling his quivering thews for a battle royal with a thing he knew not how to fight. Carthena wound her arms about her protectors neck, mumbling, “Kill it! Kill!” While her entire body trembled.

Carthena is on cheer-leading duty. Interestingly, I’m chanting the same thing, just for the other side.

The thing was almost upon Grignr when he buried his axe into the gristly maw. It passed through the blob and clanged upon the ground. Grignr drew his axe back with a film of yellow-green slime clinging to the blade. The thing was seemingly unaffected. Then it started to slooze up his leg. The hairs upon his nape stoode on end from the slimey feel of the things buly, bulk. The Nautous sucking sound became louder, and Grignr felt the blood being drawn from his body. With each hiss of hideous pucker the thing increased in size.

It began to slooze up his leg. Ahahaha.

Grignr shook his foot about madly in an attempt to dislodge the blob, but it clung like a leech, still feeding upon his rapidly draining life fluid. He grasped with his hands trying to rip it off, but only found his hands entangled in a sickly glue- like substance. The slimey thing continued its puckering ; now having grown the size of Grignr’s leg from its vampiric feast.

Yes! Drink his milkshake! Drink it up!

Grignr began to reel and stagger under the blob, his chalk white face and faltering muscles attesting to the gigantic loss of blood. Carthena slipped from Grignr in a death-like faint, a morrow chilling scream upon her red rubish lips. In final desperation Grignr grasped the smoldering torch upon the ground and plunged it into the reeking maw of the travestry. A shudder passed through the thing. Grignr felt the blackness closing upon his eyes, but held on with the last ebb of his rapidly waning vitality. He could feel its grip lessoning as a hideous gurgling sound erupted from the writhing maw. The jelly like mass began to bubble like a vat of boiling tar as quavers passed up and down its entire form.

What?! What?! No, no, no, no, no, no. WRONG. Gawd, no. It didn’t kill him? Least satisfying ending ever. I have no words. What on earth. I’m so disappointed. I’ll have to personally murder Grignr in a guest appearance in my NaNoWriMo or something, disgusting.

Comment [22]

Maybe someone else will be able to do something funny with this. I don’t really want to look through it right now for thesaurus words. Download.

Note, there are some bugs, because the program doesn’t properly recognize conjugations or possessives.

Someone may want to confirm this, but I think utilize is higher up than use.

Here is a fun excerpt:

1 bra

1 divesting

1 coddled

1 mythic

1 apparel

1 unleash

1 clomping

1 coalesce

1 ciples

1 deprive

1 attentiveness

1 backstepping

1 tenacity

1 indistinguishable

1 enlivened

1 susceptible

1 emissaries

1 vouch

1 wanderers

1 walkways

1 thwump

1 wly

1 crets

1 narrated

1 eschewed

1 episodes

1 jets

1 idolized

1 filch

1 bladesmiths

Comment [18]

Hey everyone,

You can now listen to my wonderfully grating voice as I comment on the interview that took place between Shurtugal’s Matthew Heck and Christopher Paolini. Enjoy.

Oh, funny thing. By cutting out the ridiculous amounts of awkward pauses, I managed to actually make this version shorter than the original posted version. Which is silly, because I added commentary…

Comment [15]

I’ll be direct, the difference between a writer and someone who merely writes is revision. Learning revision more valuable than learning any other skill, should you want to be a writer. As we’ve undoubtedly seen, a lot of bad books have arisen from a lack of revision. Fortunately, there isn’t terribly much to revision, besides a lot of sweat and some painful introspection. The concept of revision is sometimes misunderstood, however, and this merits clearing up.

What is revision?

Revision is one of those words that is entirely self explanatory. It is RE-Vision. ‘Re’ meaning do it again. It had better be better, too. A revision should not be confused with a mere edit. An edit is pedantic, detail orientated. An edit looks at all the tiny parts of a sentence, an edit is a dissection. On the other hand, a revision is a sweeping revolution, a haphazard macro-evolution.

In an edit you fiddle with the little details of a sentence, adjusting it for grammatical accuracy and stylistic beauty. In a revision you look at your piece as a whole and ask yourself hard questions concerning the purpose of organization, setting, overall style, mood, pacing, tone, etc. These are the qualities you discern after reading the entire piece, not the qualities you identify from a single sentence. It’s in the revision process that you discover your story is progressing too slowly, or that your tone comes off as too angry, or that you really dislike one of your characters. In each step of the revision process you should be RE-visioning. I did a lot of revision with my story The Climb but I probably still didn’t do enough. For illustrative purposes I’ll walk through that process.

Initial Concept: Nora and Adam live in a future where the world is entirely covered in cloudcast. During his astronomy class at The Science and Mathematics Academy for the Advancement of Practical Applications Adam wonders what stars, the sun, and the moon look like. His teacher won’t answer—she’s never seen them herself. Everyone is in denial, telling themselves the absence of these celestial objects they’ve never seen is worth whatever caused the cloudcast. Despite his friend Nora’s concerns, Adam is determined to see the moon for himself—no one else is remotely curious. Adam climbs an enormous telecommunication mast and breaks cloud cover, seeing the moon for the first time ever. On the tower Adam dies of hypothermia, during his dying thoughts he reflects that he’s always had the moon nearby after all—Nora. His body is never found, as he became frozen to the tower.

Revisioning: I’m on a page limit for this piece, so I can’t spend too much time developing the setting. In particular this whole dystopian future requires too much explanation. I really love this particular concept, but it’s not right for what I’m currently doing, so it’s being shelved. However, the image of someone climbing up a metal tower is very evocative to me, so I’m keeping that. Look for more having to do with the relationship between character and setting soon.A new setting is needed, but the climb can be kept. With the new setting comes a necessary character change.

New Concept: Nora and Neal live in the middle of nowhere. Nora wants to climb the local cellphone tower, but Neal doesn’t like the idea.

Revisioining: This is a very rough skeleton. Nora and Neal need a more fleshed out relationship, and motivations.

Concept: Nora and Neal have been dating for ages, childhood friends for even longer. Little ever happens in the middle of nowhere, and Nora is frustrated and bored. There are hints at underlying relationship difficulties as the issue of climbing the tower gets brought up, although it is clear the two are very affectionate. Neal is afraid of losing Nora—in more ways than one. Eventually Nora wins, and climbs the tower. This is an awakening call for her, and she leaves Neal.

Revisioning: Thanks to input from people here I know the pacing was wrong, the ending was rushed and Nora’s decision came too quickly. Even if it had been brewing in the back of her mind for a while, it was too quick. As people Nora and Neal needed to be fleshed out more, in terms of interests and other details.

The final concept you can see for yourself in the Critique section. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, in large part because I went through the revision process. What isn’t shown is a whole ton of small revisions, because showing those would be tedious. Unfortunately, the revision process is tedious. Everytime you do a revision you should begin typing your story from the very beginning. Remember, this isn’t an edit. This is a process of redoing something with a new vision.

Retyping the entire thing might seem like a pain, but it has a number of benefits. By not referring to your old manuscript you rid yourself of its undue influence on future drafts. Let me tell you, first drafts of anything are certain to be bad. Why base all of your future work on that kind of base? To an extent, you’ll get bored retyping the story, and this will force you to do things to make it more interesting. As a result, you’ll come up with new metaphors and imagery, develop new dialogue, and even write in new scenes entirely. Without your old manuscript to refer to you might occasionally forget something, and be unable to reproduce it in your new draft. This is great. If you, the author, can’t remember something it means it probably wasn’t that memorable. The reader is even more likely to forget it. That’s not the kind of story you want to write. You want your writing to have a haunting quality, or at least a memorable quality to it. So anything you forget is a pleasing—you can replace it with something better.

Of course, this advice applies mainly to short story. For a full novel it might not be practical to rewrite it constantly (actually, this is exactly what many great writers have done). I would recommend rewriting entire chapters. In a longer story you’ll probably have to delete and rewrite entire chapters as you gain a new vision for your story.

Where editing belongs

I like to call the above process the Revision Cycle. It’s only after you finish the revision cycle that you should edit. Editing is a pretty time consuming art, and it’s pointless editing something you will discard later. By the time you finish an editing session on an old revision you’ll probably notice it could use a general revision. So you might as well wait. Of course, if you are presenting your writing to people for critique you should do a quick cleaning up edit. It gives people a better impression of your writing.

Summary

Definitely revise. It’s a process of gradual improvement, and if you compare your first draft to your final draft you’ll definitely spot the improvement. Writing it definitely about practice more than anything, so you should try to write lots of stories, but you can get lots of practice in on a single piece if you revise it thoroughly.

Comment [8]

In a world of cultural trends that seem to rise and fall in a moment’s time, the current object of obsession among American teenagers has a peculiarly pervasive character. This object is the Twilight franchise, consisting of a book series by Stephanie Meyer and a newly released movie. Both the books and the movie center on the love story between a teenage girl, Bella Swan, and the 108-year-old vampire boy, Edward Cullen, who attends her high school. The enormity of the series’ teenage fan base—most of whom are girls—is compounded by its fans’ devotion to the two main characters.

To many outsiders the appeal of Twilight is baffling, and rightly so. Never before has romance with the undead been so mainstream and socially acceptable.

There is something fishy and entirely unsettling about Twilight’s popularity and the lack of resistance to its grip on teenage culture. When J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series attained similar popularity, many church groups denounced its rise to fame. There was furor over the series’ subject matter of a magical world of wizardry, which religious critics claimed would lead children down the path of witchcraft, demonology, and the sacrifice of goats on altars. Terrifying, truly. And overblown, as such claims usually are.

Why are the repulsive behaviors espoused in Twilight not angrily protested in the same way? When you get down to it, Twilight is a series about romancing the undead, in as much as Harry Potter is a series about witchcraft. Many of Edward Cullen’s most devoted fans try to act like or delude themselves into believing that they are vampires. It is often the most vulnerable kids, those who are already members of various goth, emo, or other subcultures, who are drawn to the idea of being a vampire.

The mainstream press has not covered any of the horrific incidents that get reported in online forums, and you have to wonder why. Many fans perform experiments to try and determine whether they are vampires. Most experiments question whether the vampires enjoy the taste of blood—if they don’t, they aren’t “true” vampires. You’ve probably heard of cutting epidemics or heard jokes about wrist-slitting. This used to just be a hallmark of the emo subculture, but increasingly people have been cutting to get a taste of their own blood.

Why then hasn’t there been a widespread revolt against this among religious groups? Because of agenda. You see, Twilight has a pro-abstinence message, and the existence of this seems to absolve it of any sin whatsoever. Author Stephenie Meyer is a Christian, and she has very handily inserted her ideology into her books. In her fantastically delusional world, it is perfectly normal for a boyfriend and girlfriend to lie together in bed for hours in their underwear and talk. The same religious conservatives who condemned Harry Potter are such fans of this message that they are willing to forgive the part in which Bella sleeps with an undead abomination. Lovely.

If you dig down a bit deeper, you find abstinence to be only a part of the agenda. The rest of the book is a thorough destruction of modern feminism, starting with the concept that women can be independent. The question the story poses is, why be an independent female when your perfect vampire boyfriend can do everything for you? Bella is a perpetual damsel in distress, and she is constantly depicted as weak and submissive. Without Edward sweeping in to save the day, she can’t even walk over a patch of ice without finding herself in dire danger. One of the greatest flaws of Twilight is the utter lack of personality Bella exhibits. Her hobby is Edward. Her life ambition is Edward. Her favorite book is Romeo & Juliet, which is hardly a subtle allusion to her desire for Edward. She is vacuous, and her first goal in life is to be married. She thinks of nothing beyond this.

It seems more than a tad medieval that Bella thinks not at all of a future career, or academic study, or of anything besides Edward. Edward is her man, and the center of her apparently pre-suffrage life. And what a strange sort of man Edward is, too. In the first months of their relationship, Edward does nothing but stalk Bella, and utter creepy lines such as “I like watching you sleep.” Edward is shown as overbearing and controlling, but this is not portrayed as a flaw in the books. At times Edward is downright abusive, even coming to the point of physically hitting Bella. This is coupled with the strange psychological abuse he puts her through, claiming that she can’t be with him and that she should leave him forever.

The entire book is an extended analogy for forbidden sex, beginning with the allusion to the Original Sin that is displayed proudly on the book’s front cover. Bella is constantly tempting Edward with her blood, which he must resist sucking her free of. When read with a discerning eye, it becomes clear that this book is about virginity. Many people know this, and are overjoyed that their daughters are reading a book that promotes abstinence and servitude.

I have no problem with the idea of abstinence, or with anyone having religious beliefs, but the double standards and sexism bother me greatly. Harry Potter contains elements of the occult, and so does Twilight. Unlike Harry Potter, Twilight has not been accused of leading children down the road to hell, in spite of its virgin sacrifices and vampire bloodsucking. And unlike Harry Potter, which depicts female characters as strong, smart, and capable, Twilight promotes sexism in the worst ways possible: by giving girls the impression that they should be meek and servile, instead of active and independent.

It also creates an unrealistic set of expectations, wherein Twilight fans expect any potential boyfriend to be like Edward. Guys overwhelmingly dislike Twilight because they overwhelmingly dislike Edward. I would not wish Edward on any of my female friends, and I’m appalled at the idea that any of them might be attracted to someone like him. Any teenage boy who watches a girl sleeping from her windowsill should not be portrayed as ideal or sensitive. He is a boy who should be taken to counseling; his behavior is clearly deviant. It is the lack of coherent moral judgment and the twisted nature of the message taken from scenes such as this one that make the popularity of the Twilight franchise a dangerous and unsettling trend.

Comment [66]

This review of my Twilight experience was been planned for a long time, and isn’t quite as relevant now. The weekend after release night, I and handful of brave II members (Lord Snow, Elanor, Jeni, and Eccentric Iconoclast) embarked on a movie going experience that would cost us the following:

• Ten US dollars
• 122 minutes
• Our dignity as humans
• A sizeable portion of our souls

Had I been an enemy combatant, the Geneva Convention would also have been violated on that night. There was no line when Lord Snow and I arrived at the theater, so getting our tickets was easy. I had to hide a laugh in a cough when I asked the girl at the ticket counter for a ticket to Twilight. She probably wasn’t judging me, but it was an embarrassing situation nonetheless.

I had expected huge lines, so we ended up arriving about an hour early. I felt slightly ridiculous to be a Twilight hater who showed up earlier than the fans to get tickets, so we went over to the Borders to look around and link up with the rest of our group. I was amused to see Twilight and Inheritance placed side by side—bookstores know their demographics.

When we finally entered the theater it was packed. We sat in the third row from the front, which is just next to eyestrain aisle. Lord Snow and I weren’t the only Y chromosomes in the theater, I’m quite sad to report. Along with the chaperoning fathers, there were also some single guys. I’m going to posit a correlation between watching Twilight by yourself and being single. I think even girls who like Twilight know there is something off about a guy who likes Twilight. Just throwing it out there. Obviously the largest demographic was middle class teenage females—a corporate marketing agent’s fantasy come true.

The audience was actually fairly quiet, not at all like the screaming masses I heard of elsewhere. Probably Minnesota Nice kept the crowd more or less sane. I love Minnesota. There was only mild screaming when Edward first came on screen, and not a lot of that “take it off, hottie!” nonsense. Granted, most of the screaming actually came when the Half-Blood Prince trailer aired, and Daniel Radcliffe in all his robed glory appeared. Make of that what you will.

The hottie, of course, was Robert Pattinson. They couldn’t possibly have been referring to Kristen Stewart, because the make-up department spent extra time making her look as unattractive as possible, and the costume department did its part too. Now, it was my understanding that in a Hollywood movie if you aren’t sexy you had better be good at acting, and sometimes they even expect both. To call Kristen Stewart an actress is an insult to the many actresses who can do facial expression. Stewart looked perpetually bored. Maybe she was trying to read the book while the movie was being filmed. Occasionally she would use her facial muscles to tug slightly at the edges of her lips, in what some of us call “a smile”. This was evidently the cause of much distress, given the expression of pain in her eyes. It didn’t help, however, that she barely closed her mouth throughout the entire movie. Presumably she was so dazzled by Edward’s amazing sparkle, she forgot she had jaw muscles. It’s possible Kristen was just too embarrassed to be in the movie to really try and act. After all, she was given some of the worst source material in existence, and the script writing didn’t drastically improve on the writing.

I’m inclined not to forget Kristen, because her cast mate Robert Pattinson did so much better on all levels. Especially since his unstated goal was to ruin the movie. Some choice quotes of his include, “I read the book and was like ‘Well this is really dumb, I’ll never ever… This is so pointless going up for the role.’” and also “And the more I read the script, the more I hated this guy, so that’s how I played him, as a manic-depressive who hates himself. Plus, he’s a 108 year-old virgin so he’s obviously got some issues there”. Because I knew he was trying to destroy the movie from the inside out, I was much more sympathetic to Pattinson’s struggles with the script. Unlike Stewart, he actually attempted to inject some life and even some humor into the delivery, even as he loathed the entire experience. Pattinson was probably given even more embarrassing lines than Kristen. Some little nuggets of diarrhea include, “I like watching you sleep”, a line which Kitty mocked much better than I ever could; and also, “You are exactly my brand of heroin”, said in a nicely angst-filled voice. The script writers might have drawn inspiration for its remarkable romance from the Star Wars prequel trilogy, another series renown for its amazingly well written romance. If the romance in Star Wars can be summed up as “Padme, I hate sand. You aren’t like sand. So I love you”, then the romance in Twilight could be summed up as “Bella, I love heroin. You are like heroin. So I love you”. Stunning, really. Beyond that, the script writings forgot to mention anything Edward could possibly have seen in Bella. Not even any redeeming qualities, to make up for her being clingy, whiny, shallow.

When producing the Twilight movie everyone seemed to have forgotten chemistry, that vital little thing that makes romance tick. It was absolutely nowhere to be seen in Twilight. Pattinson seemed about as happy to be kissing Stewart as he would be about kissing a dead possum, and for her part Stewart simply looked bored. Pattinson was still the more dynamic of the two, and at times it even seemed like he wasn’t utterly revolted at the concept of Stewart. Seriously though, they spent a sizeable portion of the movie gazing into each other’s eyes, and yet, I still didn’t get the impression these were two people who loved each other and wanted to be together forever. Or even that they were two people mildly sexually interested in each other and wanted to have a one night stand. The closest they ever came was a wonderful scene in a meadow right after Edward has revealed his sparkliness to her, and they gaze soulfully into each others’ eyes while the camera circles around them. Just like in all those trashy romance movies.

Part of the problem was that the camera was zoomed SO FREAKING CLOSE. Stewart hasn’t really mastered the art of nuanced facial expression, so a close zoom on her face is about as expressive as faded wallpaper. You know how 80% of communication comes from body language? Well, that assuredly isn’t true, but the fact is, a lot of communication is through body language. And when the camera is zoomed so far in you can’t see bodies, so you don’t see any body language. Had there been some body language, maybe we would have felt a bit of the sexual tension. If she is wrapping her legs around him, and pressing her pelvis into him, then we would get the picture. But not from zooming in on the faces. (Of course, had they been more racy, then parents would have thrown a fit. Which just goes to show what an enormous pander this movie was.)

Oh, the romance. So yeah, that was bad. What else is there in the plot of Twilight? Well, some other stuff, I suppose. The pacing is entirely wrong. It’s slower than a dead whale on land, but that should only be expected—after all, they were trying to condense a tedious and self-indulgent teenage diary into a two hour film. Let’s take a moment and take a quiz. What was the one thing you knew about the movie before you went to see it? That it was about vampires? That Edward was a vampire? Yeah. If it wasn’t already perfectly obvious from the trailer (subtlety is not a strong point of this film), then most likely some breathy teenage Twihard told you while ejaculating about how great Edward was. So why then, does the movie spend an entire hour discovering Edward is a vampire? A terrible script is the only explanation I can come up with, as this was one of the densest decisions I’ve watched in film for quite some time. For an entire hour you get to watch the stupid and vacuous version of high school Bella attends. This is boring. So much time is wasted in the slow beginning that the male audience has lost interest by the time things start occurring (and the movie jumps the shark). By comparison, the ending seems rushed. After the revelation at the half way mark that Edward is a vampire, everything starts happening in fast-forward. Just fast enough that the ridiculous gaps in logic fly by before you can notice.

Yeah, the plot is pretty bad, and slow. But that’s not the only thing that goes into making a good movie, right? Atmosphere and setting can do a great deal to improve a movie. So what’s the setting like? Well, for one thing, vampires are pussies.

Probably all of you are already aware of the numerous ways the vampire myth has been raped in Twilight. Vampires aren’t allergic to garlic, silver doesn’t burn them, crosses don’t repel them, running water doesn’t repulse them, their reflections show up in mirrors, sunlight doesn’t disintegrate them. What does sunlight do? Actually, it’s nearly as bad in Twilight. It brings on a bout of embarrassingly bad CGI, along with a lovely background accompaniment of tingtingting. (Because Edward’s sparkles are so cool, they even make tinkling noises.) So bad that it prompts a deep shame in Edward, so he’ll never want to appear in light. The point is, these “vampires” are hardly vampires at all. They are closer to Greek gods with an occasional penchant for blood (which compared to Zeus’s remarkable diet for pretty women is perfectly acceptable), except that the Greek gods had flaws. Edward should have been Dionysus with blood in place of wine; instead, he became Apollo, without the jealous rages.

What is the problem with this though? Shouldn’t we encourage authors to break out of the cliché, to reinvent and reimagine, to expose us to new realms and adventures? Well, sure, but don’t go calling something what it’s not. If I invented a murderous race of midget men who burrow into your chest as you sleep and eat your heart whole, I don’t go calling them elves. Why not? Because elves, like vampires, are a fantastic race with existing connotations. These things have definitions and traditions; they aren’t yours to use as a label for just anything you think of. Sure, you can create a nice play off a race, and get away with calling it with the original name, but when you reach the point where your idea is no longer the original concept, you know you’ve made a mistake.

Stephanie Meyer admitted to having no awareness of the existing myths surrounding the vampire, which is a stunning example of poor research. Had she even taken the step of Googling vampire as her “protagonist” Bella does, she could have glimpsed the vast mythos surrounding the vampire. Instead, she probably read some Anne Rice novels, which are already a road to hell. I have no doubt in my mind that Stephanie Meyer did not read Dracula before beginning her series. Her use of the vampire is entirely irreverent.

Using an existing word for a new concept dilutes the meaning of word, and confuses the idea of your own concept. Doubtless lots of people went to see Twilight expecting to see a vampire movie. I can only imagine that the surprise was unpleasant. That wasn’t a vampire movie, of course not. At worst, this is false advertising, at best this is an act of ignorance. I’m grateful Stephanie Meyer did not attempt to create a race of dwarves—tall handsome men with well maintained facial hair and no fondness for alcohol.

As a consequence of the impotent conception of the vampire comes a distinct lack of atmosphere. Twilight is not a scary movie. When a vampire seems more content to gently nuzzle your throat instead of eviscerating it, you begin to get comfortable. There is not a moment in the movie where you feel like Bella is threatened, even assuming you thought of Bella as a sympathetic character. The trailer tries to play up the “action-filled” parts of the movie, to try and trick hapless males into the watching the film. In doing so, they accidentally included every scene involving action in that entire movie. The trailer is an infinitely scarier piece of cinematography than the actual movie. Every potentially scary situation that was displayed in the trailer is infinitely diffused by a ridiculous display of vampire power that renders the threat nonexistent. Thus the “horror” designation on this Horror/Action/Romance movie seems misappropriated. Same goes for the “action” designation.

It’s also hard to take seriously the atmosphere of the movie when it is saturated with a ridiculous amount of product placement. Apple, BMW, Chevy, Google, Rainier, Volvo, etc. I can’t tell if they thought this was a genuinely good idea, or if it was a cynical attempt at marketing to a much sought after demographic, but either way it was a complete mood killer.

None of this is helped by the backdrop provided for this movie. The sleepy Pacific Northwest is beautiful in film, but it has a soporific quality. This isn’t a flaw in of itself, but it compounds some other problems this movie has. The only time it was put to good use was with the tree climbing scene, but that was ruined by drunken camera work. It’s one thing to do a panoramic sweep of the landscape, it’s quite another to orbit around like a crack-addicted honeybee.

And now I’ve completely lost my train of thought, so I’ll talk about some visual aspects of the film.

Well, the “special” effects were pretty terrible. Every time a vampire jumped they did so in a parabola, so neatly arced that you could plot it in algebra class. That they were swinging on wires was painfully obvious. It wasn’t helped by the cheesy motion blur effect that the vampires had when running, which was stolen directly out of Queen of the Damned (which is just fitting, considering Anne Rice had to have inspired Stephanie Meyer). Not to mention the whoosh ing sound they made as they jumped.

All of this combined to make the baseball scene one of the stupidest moments in all of cinema. The Minnesota Nice finally wore off around here, when we were laughing our asses off in the theater. Some grown woman snapped and screamed, “Would you quit it with your annoying laugh!” in about the bitchiest voice possible. Of course, she wasn’t yelling at me, because my laughter doesn’t sound annoying—must have been one of you other people, to be sure. The entire scene can be summarized like this: everyone sets up ridiculously quickly, Bella pretends to act, Alice pitches (sexy), Rosalie hits the ball, Edward runs, moment of drama, Alice pitches (sexy), Carlisle hits the ball, Edward and Hunky Dude collide, Alice pitches (sexy), Jasper hits the ball, Hunky Dude jumps, Biker Dudes show up. They hit the ball the same way every single time. Super interesting. And they didn’t keep track of score, or show who was on what base, so it’s not like there was any reason to be interested in the game itself. It was simply there to show off the might of the vampires, and introduce CONFLICT. Conflict with ridiculous looking biker dudes, that is. Twilight, like any self respecting film, makes its villains look like utter retards, which makes us really scared of them, or something.

Not that James was the only person who looked silly. They all did. The Cullen family looked like a group of A&F models dropped into flour. Which was probably all the effort the make up department put into it. Additionally, Bella looks pale enough to be a vampire already, which is just hunky-dory. The sparkles…were terrible. When Edward went out into the sun to show Bella what a monstrosity he was there was another round of laughter from our ultra-conspicuous row. That was probably the worse CGI I have ever seen in my entire life, including while I was in a first year computer modeling class. Someone must have just taken a photoshop sparkle brush and applied it to Edward, because that’s what it looked like. The sparkles were so small and close together it looked like Edward had a layer of white fur—utterly ridiculous. And that scene was the dream that inspired the book, I kid you not.

In summary, the entire thing was one massive collage of fail and stupid. If you are going to see this movie make sure you see it with a friend. Also make sure that either the friend pays, or the friend puts out. Otherwise it is unacceptable to be caught watching this movie.

I’ll leave you with a video of Kristen Stewart at her incoherent babbling finest.

How you can help spread the message

Comment [70]

Good lord, look at the madness we have descended into. Anyways, someone showed us this Twilight review, and we couldn’t help ourselves.

Just when you thought that the vampire genre of vampire fiction couldn’t mire itself any deeper in clichés, along comes Twilight.

SS— Oh, man, this’ll be good! Rip Twilight to pieces!
K— Let us sing Auld Lang Syne again!

Written by total unknown Stephenie Meyer, Twilight revolves around two star-crossed lovers

K— Because this hasn’t been done to death. Never mind.
SS— Yeah, sun-crossed lovers would be more original.

- shy, introverted 17-year-old Isabella (Bella) Swan and cold, enigmatic 107-year-old vampire Edward Cullen – who meet in the gloomy town of Forks.

SS— Shy AND introverted? Woah.
K— She never struck me as the shy type, just too high-and-mighty to talk to her classmates.

The novel has won several accolades, including the Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and #5 on The New York Times bestseller list during its debut in 2005.

SS: NYT Bestsellers: proof that people judge books based on their covers anyways.

The story is narrated from Bella’s perspective, so the reader is always intimate with the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings as she tries to adjust to a new life at Forks.

SS— And boy are her thoughts whiny.

It also veils the story with an air of mystery as she pieces together the true identity of the beautifully reclusive Cullens.

SS— If you can’t guess the “twist”, then you probably couldn’t guess the ending of the Bible either. Fail.

(No prizes for guessing the answer before she does.) There’s no prize if you guessed the answer before she does, however.

K— Hot dog, this is awesome! And by awesome I mean make it stop!
SS— (That thing she did with the parentheticals is terrible.) Those things she did with the parentheticals are terrible.

On the other hand, the titillating

SS— Huzzah.

(but never blatantly sexual) scenes between our lovers are more than reasons enough to compel us to continue reading,

K— At least if you like disappointment.
SS— If you are reading Twilight just for the sparkle-porn, please stop existing.

page after page.

SS— after page, after page, after page, after page, make it end. ._.

Bella’s fascination with the hauntingly ethereal Edward

SS— I can tell you’ve been reading SMeyer’s rotten, grotesque, overleaden prose.

extends well beyond curiosity, and while it’s inevitable that they should fall in love, the pains and inner conflicts that their love invokes in both of them is something that the reader can’t help but empathize with.

K— I can’t! Well, damn, I must be really heartless.
SS— I can totally sympathize with a guy who likes to put girls through emotional rollercoasters! (No, I cannot.)

The titillating (but never blatantly sexual) scenes between this odd pair of lovers are more than reasons enough to compel us to continue reading, page after page.

K— Lesson 45 in reviewing stuff: you’re getting paid by the word.
SS— Didn’t you already say titillating before? Tits.
K— Stop that. Tits.
SS— I’m in titters. Tits.
K— That was a terrible pun. Tits.

Whether or not you’re a longtime fan of the vampire fiction (and movie) genre, Twilight is a refreshing read. Having a vampire as a protagonist isn’t something new, but having an entire coven of vegetarian vamps is (and deliciously so!),

K— If by “deliciously new” you mean “pussified”, then yes, it is.
SS— That parenthetical doesn’t connect with any of the proceeding clauses, does it? (Maybe she should really stop using those.)

and Meyer’s portrayal of the Cullens coven isn’t even half as lame as the premise sounds.

SS— Not half as lame. About twice as lame.
K— No no, you’re being too generous.
SS— Let T(n) = 2^T(n-1) and T(1) = 2. Then Twilight’s lameness = T(1000).
K— You and your damn math.

Meyer’s fanged bloodsuckers are stylishly modern, rich, and play baseball during thunderstorms.

K— This is a safe and not-at-all stupid thing to do during a thunderstorm.
SS— I’m just waiting for the scene where Edward waves around his metal bat in the air, and is struck by lightning.

This definitely makes for a radical change from the usual apocalyptic, ritualisticancient,

K— Bless you.

pale and bloodthirsty bad guys that we’re so accustomed to seeing the vampires portrayed as.

SS— A radical change, unless you happened to have been reading ANNE RICE recently. So, oops, nothing new after all.

Better yet, Twilight succeeds in keeping itself from being overly self-indulgent.

SS— ORLY? You probably haven’t read Breaking Dawn.
K— Alright, this is just an outright lie.

Despite its orientation with the chick literature genre, Twilight avoids the generic feminine issues that tend to plague the genre,

K— You mean like whining, insecurity, and whining insecurity?
SS— What she means is that unlike most books, Twilight tries to undo the work of a half century of feminism. BOW TO YOUR MALE VAMPIRE MASTERS, WOMAN.

making it an accessible, perhaps even fashionable, read for males.

K— I think your read is faaaabulous!
SS— If by fashionable you mean “shops at Hot Topic”.

On the other side of the coin, the novel is surprisingly sparing on action scenes, so female reader need not be thrown off by any senseless fighting.

K— But I love senseless fighting…
SS— Strong sexism?
K— No, I’m just a mannish woman :[
SS— I didn’t mean you, I meant the reviewer. :P
K— [smashes beer can against forehead]

Indeed, the romance between Bella and Edward remains the most intoxicating essence of the masterpiece that is Twilight, this masterpiece of a novel.

SS— Masterpiece. You’ve gone too far. Far too far.

All in all, Twilight is definitely in vogue, having garnered millions of fans worldwide.

SS— Captain Obvious, reporting to the deck of the Enterprise.
K— Popular does not necessarily mean good. See also: rap, acid wash jeans, and Hitler.
SS— Hint to wannabe hipsters: Goodwill has really stylish looking jeans, because they’ve been, you know, actually worn. That’s the real worn jeans experience. Or, you could actually wear your jeans until they got worn, you.

It has even been adapted into a movie (see review on opposite pagee)!

SS— That TOTALLY makes your book good! Just like Eragon. :)

Whether if you’re into vampires or not, give it a try. And you’ll find that once you’ve sunk your teeth into it, there’s absolutely no extricating from it.

K— We are the fangirls. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Can you resist temptation? Why should you?

K— You will comply.

Comment [49]

Introduction

It is important that I frame this article correctly. It is not a response to any specific incident, or any specific writer. This article responds to a broader issue, which appears to have been met with some confusion lately. What is this site for? What is it suppose to do? Woe is ImpishIdea, the existential website. Actually, we aren’t holed up reading Søren Kierkegaard in the least—we have a very clear vision for this place, one that we’ve been somewhat unable to articulate. I’m to blame for that. This site is for criticism. And it is solely for criticism. Other effects are intentional side-effects of criticism, but they are not the focus of the site.

What we mean by criticism

‘Criticism’ is a word that carries such unnecessarily negative connotations. It gets a lot of criticism itself. Take a look at some quotes on the topic of criticism.

“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.” —Benjamin Franklin

“Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.” —Jean Sibelius

Perhaps the most damning.

“When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.” —Unattributed

So, fair enough. But I feel as though these quotes talk about the other kind of criticism, the one that I’m not so interested in. Here is a quote on our brand of criticism.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” —Winston Churchill

I find the negative connotations attached to the idea of criticism to be entirely regrettable. The importance of criticism should be obvious. If I learned to play the piano with my hands crossed and no one lets me know this is incorrect, then I’ll fail to learn piano. This seems self-evident to me, yet critics are met with incredible resistance when we point out the flaws in Inheritance or Twilight. If Paolini isn’t informed that his writing is purple, he’ll never know. Of course, in our day to day interactions we hesitate to criticize our friends and co-workers. We know how much cognitive dissonance can hurt, and as sympathetic people we shrink away from actions that would cause hurt. Avoiding pointing out flaws works out about as nicely as tons of white lies, however, and I believe we should embrace open honesty about mistakes and problems.

It’s important to point out that the criticism here is not for bringing down, disparaging, belittling, or insulting anyone. Some people have expressed the ideas that Paolini or Meyer didn’t deserve their success, and we should be somehow making up for that. No. These people do not represent the whole of ImpishIdea. I wish Christopher Paolini and Stephanie Meyer the very best in all their endeavors. We simply hope they put their remarkable position to good use. Nor do we wish financial ruin for their publishing companies. Then, one might ask why we discuss these two authors with such intensity.

What we are doing, or, side-effects

Well, we have picked out these two authors in particular. For simple reasons: mistake density, and popularity. That’s all there is to it. Mistake density because we might as well catch as many problems as we can in a single book. It’s a very pragmatic measure, for the most part. And some mistakes are so glaring that we can’t ignore them. The popularity really helps. Here’s where those side-effects we mentioned come in. You can certainly learn from other people’s mistakes. Sure, it is more instructive to learn from your own, but you might as well get an extra boost from reading Eldest for mistakes. The criticism we level isn’t actually instructive unless you’ve read the books, hence targeting books with the largest audiences. I am somewhat of an entrepreneur, so I also think this is where the opportunity is (as much as I’ve tried to separate II from commercial interests). The main idea is connecting to an audience, so they can relate, and learn something about writing through it.

This is really the reason ImpishIdea exists. As a goal we’ve picked promoting better writing, and its something we do through our criticism. Yes, we do occasionally run writing articles that aren’t that critical. Chiefly this is to deflect criticism that all we do is bitch from sun rise to sun down. We don’t; most of us are amateur writers who have a personal interest in the subject. As amateur writers we like to help each other out, and we want to see the craft as an institution improve. Improvement is spurred by the suggestions of criticism.

Comment [42]

Alright, alright. Calm down. So, some of you didn’t enjoy the book.

The biggest downfall to this series is not that it is jam-packed with cliches, or that Bella is completely hopeless. The biggest downfall has got to be the marketing—the fact that every one of you disappointed readers had gotten your hopes up for ‘the next big thing,’ only to find that it wasn’t to your liking.

Let me point out that 1) this was written for teenagers. And not in the sense that Harry Potter was written for teenagers—because it wasn’t—but this was made specifically catering to the girly longings most teenage girls have. Yes, it appeals to some of us adults. I found it a refreshing change from my complex, heavy-plotted novels that I’ve grown bored of as of late. 2) Yes, Bella is hopeless. She doesn’t think there is an interesting speck to her. Honestly, do any of us think such things? Bella would HARDLY be interesting if she knew she was beautiful. If she had one talent to her, aside from the protection her mind has from any sort of assault, everyone would be griping about that. I remember reading a book about a woman who had a dozen talents. I hated her for it. and 3) Yes, of course the book is remarkably cheesy at times. Sometimes, it’s what we want. The series only gets cheesier, mind you. And I loved every moment of it. Almost. (I found myself angry with a certain character in ‘Eclipse.’ But not angry with Meyer. Still, the anger lasted for quite some time.)

I’m a writer, too. It’s made reading books a little less enjoyable, because I’m constantly picking at other novels. I barely finish them nowadays, and if I do, it takes me ages. Of course there were problems with Twilight. There are problems with every novel. And I can see why some people wouldn’t enjoy the book just as I can see why so many girls adore it. If you take the book too seriously… if you expect something life-changing, of course you aren’t going to like it. But the book was fun. I had fun. Amazingly, I finished all three books in less than a week. I couldn’t put them down.

My Review
Despite some flaws in the novel… and I’m not talking about grammatical or spelling errors, I’m talking about odd glitches in the plot… I ADORED it, Stephenie Meyer. I’m amazingly picky about vampire novels, and I HATE romance novels right down to my core. But I loved this series. I loved Bella… she was human to me. She was selfish, and she struggled to be seen as good while all the while letting her desires win over. I loved her attitude, and her sarcasm. I love that she was very weird. And of course, I loved Edward, but that I won’t get into. That’s only because I’m a girl.

There was never a boring moment, to me, in the entire series. I devoured each book in record time… and quickly moved on to the next. Now, I’m left with a horrible ache as I wait for August to roll around. Maybe I’ll try The Host next, to ease my longing. In fact, that has to be one of my complaints—where ARE the dull moments? Do you realize, I stayed up until four AM to finish Twilight, because there was no place I could easily stop reading and fall asleep? I’d be awake, too anxious to sleep… wanting to know what happened next. Now I’m all done with the books released right now… now, I have nothing to do. Some who are not Twilighters would tell me to go read other books. Ha. What a silly thought. :D
I wonder if Stephenie Meyer reads these reviews. If she does, I want her to know I liked the series more than Harry Potter. I could list my reasons why, but that’d take too long. Those comparing the book to Harry Potter also should get something in their heads… it’s like comparing Underworld to ‘My best Friend’s Wedding’. Two completely different types of books, only brought together with the illusion that both series are made for young adults. shakes head

Oh well. I guess I’m a twilighter now. shrugs

Comment [28]

Inspired by some things I’ve read, I wanted to try out something different today. The goal here is to simply get us thinking deeply about the way we read and analyze passages. There are a lot of questions here, and I cannot stress enough that there is no right answer to any of them. The process of coming up with an answer, however, will hopefully help analytic skills.

An excerpt from In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William Gass

People

1    Their hair in curlers and their heads wrapped in loud scarves,
2    young mothers fattish in trousers, lounge about in the speed-wash, smok-
3    ing cigarettes, eating candy, thumbing magazines, and scream-
4    ing at their children above the whir and rumble of the machines.

5    At the bank a young man freshly pressed is letting himself in with
6    a key. Along the street, delicately teetering, many grandfathers move in a
7    dream. During the murderous heat of summer, they perch on window 
8    ledges, their feet dangling just inside the narrow shelf of shade the store
9    has made, staring steadily into the street. Where their consciousness has
10   gone I can't say. It's not in the eyes. Perhaps it's diffuse, all temperature and 
11   skin, like an infant's, though more mild. Near the corner there are several 
12   large overalled men employed in standing. A truck turns to be weighed on 
13   the scales at the Feed and Grain. Images drift on the drugstore window. 
14   The wind has blown the smell of cattle into town. Our eyes have been 
15   driven in like the eyes of the old men. And there's no one to have mercy 
16   on us.

The Church

1    Friday night. Girls in dark skirts and white blouses sit in ranks and scream
2    in concert. They carry funnels loosely stuffed with orange and black paper
3    which they shake wildly, and small megaphones through which, as drilled,
4    they direct and magnify their shouting. Their leaders, barely pubescent
5    girls, prace and shake and whirl their skirts above their bloomers. The
6    young men, leaping, extend their arms and race through puddles of amber
7    light, their bodies glistening. In a lull, though it rarely occurs, you can hear
8    the squeak of tennis shoes against the floor. Then the yelling begins again,
9    and then continues; fathers, mothers, and neighbors joining in to form a single
10   pulsing ululation--a cry of the whole community--for in this gymnasium
11   each body becomes the bodies beside it, pressed as they are together, thigh
12   to thigh, and the same shudder runs through all of them, and runs toward
13   the same release. Only the ball moves serenely through this dazzling din. 
14   Obedient to law it scarcely speaks but caroms quietly and lives at peace.

Questions

Reader and Purpose

1. What impression do you think Mr. Gass conveys about the women in the laundromat? What about the old men who “perch on window ledges”? And the people at the basketball game? Be able to support your answers.

Organization

2. The first two sentences of the second paragraph of “People” flow together nicely, yet they are not linked either by a connection like therefore or however or by repetition of a key word. What does unify them? When you compare the images in these two sentences, is irony suggested?

3. Is there a topic statement in this second paragraph? If not, could you supply one? Is there, in other words, a controlling idea which determines the writer’s selection of details.

4. Has “The Church” a topic sentence? What slight change in the scene occurs in the sentence beginning in line 7 of this paragraph? Is there another change in the following sentence?

Sentences

5. The opening sentence of “People” is long and complicated. Is its main clause at the beginning, in he middle, or at the end? Point out the parallel elements in this sentence.

6. Suppose that first sentence were broken down into several shorter ones:

The younger mothers lounge about the speedwash. They are fattish in trousers. They wear their hair in curlers and wrap their heads in loud scarves. While they wait they smoke cigarettes, eat candy, drink pop, or thumb through magazines. Now and then they scream at their children above the whir and rumble of the machines.

Has our perception of the scene been modified? Does this scene seem less unified or more?

7. Comment on how these revisions change the meaning or emphasis of Mr. Gass’s sentences:

(a) Revision: Our eyes have been driven in like the eyes of old men and there’s no one to have mercy on us.
Gass: “Our eyes have been driven in like the eyes of the old men. And there’s no one to have mercy on us.” (“People,” 14-16)

(b) Revision: The leaping young men extend their arms and race through puddles of amber light, their bodies glistening.
Gass: “The young men, leaping, extend their arms and race through puddles of amber light, their bodies glistening.” (“The Church,” 5-7)

8. “Friday night” (line 1 of “The Church) is a fragment. Would it be an improvement to write it out in a formally complete sentence: “It is Friday night”?

9. What is the grammatical name of the construction “their bodies glistening” (“The Church,” 7)?

Diction

10. Look up: consciousness (9), diffuse (10); pubescent (4), lull (7), pulsing ululation (10), serenely (13).

11. Why are the following alternates less effective than Mr. Gass’s words? Stout for fattish (2), wait for lounge (2), walking for teetering (6), sit for perch (7); jump for prance (5), movement for shudder (12), deafening for dazzling (13).

12. Which of Mr. Gass’ words convey especially sharp visual images? Which convey aural images? Does he appeal to any sense other than vision and hearing?

13. What kind of figure of speech is “puddles of amber light” (“The Church,” 6-7)? Do you like it? Why or why not?

14. The description of the basketball game ends with the image of the ball arcing toward the basket. In that passage what is Mr. Gass implying by his use of only (13)? In what specific ways is the ball described as being different from the spectators? What general difference between them does Mr. Gass suggest? May the ball be said to embody an ideal? If so, how well does the crowd measure up to that ideal?

Point to learn

1. Good description appeals to the eyes and ears, to the nose and the taste buds and the fingertips. Seek to engage the senses of the reader in your writing.

2. The impression which a writer wishes to convey need not be stated, but it must control his selection of descriptive details.

Suggestions for writing

1. Write an impressionistic description of shoppers in a supermarket or of vagrants in a park or streetcorner.

2. Describe the crowd at a sports event or theater. Be clear in your mind what impression you want your reader to obtain, but do not tell him directly.

Comment [3]

The following is from a monthly Q&A that Shur’tugal holds. You can view it on Shur’tugal.

Mike Macauley: Hello Christopher! Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions! For those who don’t know, we’ll be doing this once a month toward the end of the month for the foreseeable future (or until we run out of questions!). We received over 200 total entries with the amount of questions coming in at close to 1000!

SS— Hey cool, a monthly source of things to comment on.

Christopher Paolini: Wow! That’s a lot of questions.

SS— This is no different than how you started your last interview. You are a published author now, you don’t have to be amazed by your popularity anymore.

Mike: Let’s jump right in. The first question: ShadeKing (among many others) asks: Is it possible that we’ll see a chapter written in Murtagh’s point of view? Keeping with the POV theme, Jack asked: Will we be reading through Saphira’s point of view again in the books or was that exclusive to Brisingr?

Christopher: Anything is possible. I will be switching points of view in Book Four, as I did in Brisingr and Eldest. When possible, I try to write from Eragon’s point of view, since he’s the main character, but if he can’t be present at some event, I use Saphira’s POV, and if she’s absent, Roran’s, then Nasuada’s, and so forth.

SS— It should be clarified, Paolini doesn’t actually write from a character’s POV. He uses third person omniscient with occasional italicized thoughts from the character he is hovering around. The switching around of “POVs” illustrates somewhat of a story telling weakness.

Typically you either stick to the perspective of a single character, or you change perspectives for dramatic purposes, telling each scene from the perspective of the character that best accentuates the importance of that scene, even if it is a minor character. When you stick to a single character, it’s because your story is strong enough to do so, and including other characters distracts from the design. When you switch characters it’s to provide outside opinions. For example, in Brisingr it’s possible you could show the scene of Eragon killing dwarves from the perspective of a dwarven bystander who is utterly terrified by this monster of a man in their midst. Maybe.

Mike: Great! Saphira’s POV was a really great addition to Brisingr.

SS— Have your opinions, if you want.

Christopher: Glad you enjoyed it.

Mike: We had lots of Eldunarí questions this time around. Gilderien asks: Will an Eldunarí from a young dragon grow along with the dragon, or will it remain the same as when it was coughed up? Keeping with the Eldunarí theme, Inheripotterfreakish asks: What is the plural of Eldunarí?

Christopher: The plural of “Eldunarí” is, in keeping with the rules of the ancient language, “Eldunarya”.

SS— Uhuh.

Christopher: As for whether an Eldunarí will continue to grow after being disgorged: no. And that’s another reason why dragons were reluctant to give up their heart of hearts while they were still young, before they had achieved the main part of their growth.

SS— I’d just like to note that dragons grow forever. What is the main part of infinity? Infinity? “Sorry, I don’t want to cough up my heart of hearts yet. I haven’t grown to half of infinity.” My, Immortality sure is a conundrum.

Mike: After the way it was explained in the book, giving up your Eldunarí sounded like it’s a scary decision to make. Look what happened to all of those who at one point did so and are now an unwilling source of a lot of Galbatorix’s evil.

Christopher: Yes. This is a subject that I will be exploring in greater depth in the next book.

Mike: We’re all looking forward to it. It was a great twist!

SS— By the standard of twists in Inheritance I suppose. The other twist being “Murtagh is Eragon’s brother”, which caught absolutely no one by surprise. This one was only surprising in so far as it came out of nowhere, and there is no way anyone could have predicted it.

Christopher: Thank you. I’ve had the idea for the Eldunarí since the very beginning of the series. It was frustrating knowing about them but not being able to talk about the heart of hearts for almost ten years.

SS— That must have required an incredible amount of self restraint given the way you foreshadowed everything else in your series.

Mike: Funny how it’s gone from the one thing you were burning to write about for ten years to the biggest discussion surrounding the books!

SS— My funny bone must be broken. The biggest thing you’ve been burning to write about had better be the cool thing your fans are discussing. Do you listen to yourself?

Here’s our next question – FlaimBroyld (among many others) asks: Going back to when Eragon and Saphira coaxed the Menoa tree into giving them the Brightsteel – does the momentary pain in Eragon’s stomach have anything (or everything) to do with what the Menoa tree wanted from them?

Christopher: Whatever the Menoa tree did or didn’t do, her plans are as long, intricate, and slow-moving as her consciousness.

SS— So it’s an Ent? That’s original.

Mike: Tricky answer! That’ll have us all thinking for sure.

SS— Translation: “Another non-answer. We’ll never get anything out of this guy.”

Christopher: :)

Mike: We had a lot of attention given to Brom in this round of questions. Unfortunately I was only able to pick a few questions but this one really stuck out – Gilderien asks: How did Brom defeat Morzan and his dragon? Were there other factors to Brom’s success than his quick thinking? Did he have help from his friends’ dragons’ Eldunarí? Could his sword, Undbitr, play any role in Book 4?

Christopher: Brom was a formidable opponent, due to his long study of fighting, both physical and magical. We didn’t see as much of him in the first book as I would have liked, but if Eragon were to spar with him now, he would still lose.

SS— Eragon seems kind of pointless then.

Brom was good. It’s not that he was stronger than everyone else, or faster, but that he studied how his enemies thought and behaved and then exploited their weaknesses. As for his various fights with the Forsworn, including Morzan and his dragon, I can’t do justice to them here. I would need to write an entire book about Brom to really explain how and why he prevailed over all but the Ra’zac.

SS— That won’t be necessary. Really.

Undbitr was lost during the fall of the Riders, and, as far as Eragon knows, no one in Alagaësia has found it.

Mike: Interesting!

SS— Either someone found it or they didn’t. I don’t see how that is interesting. Maybe interesting in that Brom didn’t know where he lost it? Why ever not? Is it ever explained whether objects can be scryed? Why can’t Brom scry his sword? And for that matter, why wasn’t Galbatorix scrying for the dragon eggs? And if you can’t scry objects, why is the magic system so damn arbitrary? I can say, “Scry for this egg” in the ancient language, so I should be able to do it. Although it’s beginning to be apparent to me that the ancient language doesn’t provide any of the rules of magic.

Mike: Faolins (among many others) asks: Eragon is Brom’s son and both were Riders; Murtagh is Morzan’s son and both were dragon Riders. Is it common for a Rider’s child to become a Rider as well?

Christopher: It wasn’t that common. Eragon and Murtagh are both fairly exceptional. Dragons like symmetry and balance, and they have a strong sense of poetic justice.

SS— Bring balance to the force and all that, right?

Choosing the son of the first Forsworn (Morzan) and the son of Morzan’s greatest enemy (Brom) would have appealed to them a great deal. It may not have been a conscious decision on the part of the baby dragons, but after being around Galbatorix and the Varden for so long, Thorn and Saphira would have acquired a strong, if general, understanding of the most important happenings in the land. This is also why Saphira sometimes seems older than she appears.

Mike: Shouldn’t Thorn have known the consequences of choosing Murtagh as his Rider?

Christopher: After over a hundred years as Galbatorix’s captive, I think that Thorn would have been overjoyed to finally come into contact with someone, anyone, who had a spark of honor and decency in him. Because, whatever else you might say about him, Murtagh, didn’t willingly choose to serve Galbatorix.

Mike: I suppose not, but even if it wasn’t his intent, Thorn hatching for Murtagh has really played right into Galbatorix’s hands (as far as we know, anyway).

Christopher: As far as we know.

Christopher: Also, Thorn was sick of just waiting in his egg for so long.

SS— You know, it used to be that dragons were willing to wait for eternity to meet just the perfect person. Saphira said things to this effect in the first book. And now this? Thorn just compromised on an okay rider? He got impatient? They’ve been eggs for hundreds of years. What’s another hundred to them? They are in suspended animation anyway.

Mike: Can’t say I’d blame him!

Christopher: He wanted to do something!

Mike: I really liked this next question… it’s definitely one that made me think! Gilderienthewise asks: In Eldest, shortly after the Blood-oath Celebration, Eragon wondered if Oromis resented the fact that the magic exacted the night before did not heal his wounds. Although Eragon “discounted the thought,” thinking that “Oromis would never be so petty,” how did Oromis actually feel?

Christopher: Oromis might have felt a twinge of resentment, but he had already made peace with his condition. Moreover, he would have agreed with the dragons that healing Eragon and giving him the strength of an elf was the best thing to do, given the ongoing struggle against Galbatorix. If the dragons had healed Oromis instead, Eragon wouldn’t have been able to fight for the Varden, because of the pain from his back, whereas Oromis could still be of some use in battle, even with his disability.

Mike: And there was simply no way for the both of them to be healed?

Christopher: To expect two such miracles at once is unrealistic.

SS— You are talking about the Deus Ex Machina ceremony here.

Also, the dragons don’t always have control of their own magic.

SS— Yes, we’ve heard this excuse before. Basically, the dragons will only kick in whenever it is convenient for the author.

They did what they could for Eragon, but it was Eragon, not Oromis, who inspired them to cast the spell they did. I’m sure that they would have helped Oromis if they could have.

Mike: All.Hail.Emperor.Murtagh asks: How can the sapphire in Aren contain so much energy? It was stated in Eldest that the perfect diamonds on the Belt of Beloth the Wise would be saturated after only several days of being given energy. How can one jewel hold so much?

Christopher: Ah, this is something that I actually discussed in Brisingr, but the section got cut during the editing process. I’m hoping to include it in Book Four instead. Suffice it to say, Aren was crafted by one of the elves’ greatest artisans and is a unique and highly valuable artifact.

SS— “Because it’d be cool.” This, again, seems inconsistent. And why can’t just cast a spell on every gem to make it hold more energy. You’ve just admitted that through some process of graft gems can be made to hold more energy. In Eldest it was shown that magic could do anything a hand done process could do (sew lace, for example) so why not just craft better gems by magic?

Mike: Well that officially kills one of my bigger theories!

Christopher: Which was?

Christopher: Oh, I remember.

Mike: That Brom’s ring was Saphira’s Eldunarí.

Christopher: If it was, Eragon would have sensed that Saphira’s consciousness when he reached into the jewel and saw the vast amount of energy stored therein.

Mike: That makes sense.

Mike: Last question—Guest123 asks: Have half-elves (human/elves or otherwise) ever existed? If so, do any exist now?

Christopher: They have existed, although most weren’t able to have children of their own. As for whether any exist now . . . let’s just say that if they do, they would have become very, very skilled at blending in with whatever race (elves or humans) they had chosen to live among. Half-elves, half-humans have much-extended life spans, but they aren’t immortal like full-blooded elves.

SS— Somehow this seems familiar.

Mike: Interesting answer!

Christopher: :)

Mike: That’s all for this round of questions! Thanks for taking everyone’s questions this month and thank you to everyone who submitted questions! We’ll see you again next month!

Christopher: I’m looking forward to it. This was fun! Thanks to everyone for such interesting questions. And as Eragon would say, “May your swords stay sharp!”

SS— Will that ever get old?

Comment [46]

There are an abundance of existing collegiate writing guides already, some of which are even excellent. So then, why do we need yet another guide? Because those other guides do things wrong.

Focus

Most guides aim for a breadth of knowledge. They are expensive enough so that you would only ever want to own one of them at a time (if even), so they’d best contain all the answers you might conceivably need. This guide is free, and the answer to any question it can’t answer should be searched for elsewhere.

This allows focus on the key topics, concepts, and techniques that are actually relevant to the vast majority of students, instead of saturating you with an abundance of inapplicable information.

Relevance

This ties in with the previous point; in their quest to answer every possible question many guides still fail to answer the most relevant questions concerning a modern student, such as the appropriate use of Wikipedia in research, among other modes of conducting research.

In-depth Study

Unlike many other guides, this book is not meant so much as a reference manual but as a self contained course on paper writing.

Table of Contents

The Beginning—the essay as a process.

The Hypothesis—the essay as a question.

The Structure—the essay as a conversation.

The Paragraph—the essay as a persuasion.

The Source—the essay as a presentation.

The Sentence—the essay as a whole.

The Beginning—the essay as a process.

The first thing to realize about writing an essay is that there is no way to get around having to do a lot of work. If you are like me, then you’ll want to spend your time efficiently so you can get more value from your few hours. An essay can only be the product of your labor, so it’s best if you get ready to do some labor.

Fortunately, doing some ground work can really simplify the process of writing in later stages. It may seem like more work in the beginning, but it has long term pay-off.

When you receive a writing assignment you should begin it immediately—first chance you get. This is because, as we will see in the next section, doing appropriate research makes the rest of your paper possible. Last minute research isn’t pretty, and neither is last minute writing.

The process of revision.

You’ll also want to run your writing through three drafts. The more revision you do the better your essay gets. I want to clarify something. There is a difference between a revision and an edit.

Revision is one of those words that is entirely self explanatory. It is RE-Vision. ‘Re’ meaning do it again. It had better get better, too. A revision should not be confused with a mere edit. An edit is pedantic, detail orientated. An edit looks at all the tiny parts of a sentence, an edit is a dissection. On the other hand, a revision is a sweeping revolution, a haphazard macro-evolution.

In an edit you fiddle with the little details of a sentence, adjusting it for grammatical accuracy and stylistic beauty. In a revision you look at your piece as a whole and ask yourself hard questions about what you are saying. An edit is the process of polishing something to a deep shine. A revision is checking to make sure you aren’t polishing a mere rock.

Doing revision on your own is difficult, though. It is hard for you to have a fresh perspective on your writing each time you revise. After all, it is your writing—writing you tend to agree with. That’s why you have friends, classmates, professors, and family. Get critique from as many people as you can each revision, and always have at least one other perspective.

These other people are willing to ask questions about your writing that you wouldn’t necessarily ask. They have no emotional attachment to the writing, because it isn’t their writing. Critique means criticism, so be clear about this. Both praise and criticism are useful and appreciated, but you might find you get too much praise and not enough criticism if you don’t specify that is what you are after. Let your other perspective know that you won’t take it personally or be hurt if they find flaws in your writing. They are pointing out flaws to help you improve, not as a slight on your character.

When you get some useful critique you’ll want to revise using that, and write another draft. In general, you write in this cycle. Revise -> Critique -> Revise, lather, rinse, repeat. When you’ve gone through the cycle two or three times you can end with. Revise -> Critique -> Edit. By your third revision you’ll start to find the critique has trouble turning up any major flaws, and they start going after the details. This is when you can edit, to remove the small imperfections and present a finished product.

You save a lot of time if you don’t edit with every draft. Editing is a very time consuming process, and you don’t want to edit something you are going to revise. Why? You could spend fifteen minutes fiddling with a sentence during editing, to make sure it is perfect, and then have to cut it during the next revision because the entire paragraph doesn’t fit. That hurts.

So far I’ve been a bit vague on the details of revision, and talked more about the philosophy of writing, so to speak. But you’ll want to have the right questions to ask during revision.

Don’t ask

Does this sentence look right? It seems a bit awkward?

Do you think this should be a semicolon or a comma?

Instead ask

Am I presenting my logical argument in a coherent manner? Is it clear to you what each step of my argumentation is? Are cause and effect relations easy to understand?

Are my paragraphs ordered effectively? Would it read better if this paragraph went ahead of that paragraph? Should I change my argument?

Am I presenting my case strongly? Are you convinced by what I say? Is the evidence I use credible?

Go for the big questions. On that note, we move to the next section.

The Hypothesis—the essay as a question.

If we ignore our metaphor of an essay being a process, what else can we think of an essay being? Perhaps as a question.

Exactly. An essay starts with a question and ends with an answer. In college people take to calling this a ‘hypothesis’, since we are educated and can therefore be pretentious if we please.

One might object, though. Isn’t the hypothesis supposed to be an answer? That’s one way to think of it, but doing it like that is hard.

When you are asked to write an essay (I’m assuming you get to pick your hypothesis) you’ve got to pick a hypothesis that is non-trivial—something people wouldn’t just know (common knowledge), something interesting, something that can be argued.

So, for the purpose of illustration, the topic is globalization. If you think of the hypothesis as an answer, then try to think of some hypotheses.

China is benefiting massively from globalization.

That’s common knowledge.

Workers in China have poor working conditions.

Also common knowledge. We can read the newspaper.

Um… Chinese automakers have been given a chance to expand?

Yes! A question. Do you start to see? When you think of the hypothesis as an answer, then you are only able to come up with hypothesises you already knew. But a hypothesis you already knew without having to research is uninteresting. However, just about any question you have can become a hypothesis. Once you answer the question you can change it to the answer style teachers like. So let’s start with

Have Chinese automakers expanded their overseas markets as a result of globalization?

as an example. Let’s say the answer to the question is no. Then your Hypothesis-Answer is just

Chinese automakers have not expanded their overseas markets as a result of globalization.

Voilà. But that isn’t the only benefit. This method helps you weed out weak hypotheses that are too broad, general, or nonsensical.

Let’s go back to the example we had of our hypothesis, back in question form.

Have Chinese automakers expanded their overseas markets as a result of globalization?

Try and answer the question. What’s the problem?

I can’t really give a yes or no answer. It depends on the company and the time span. It’s not answerable.

Right you are. Our hypothesis needs to be narrow enough for us to answer.

Has Brilliance Jinbei expanded its overseas markets as a result of globalization?

The time span we can narrow down because we know approximately when globalization became a global trend. So this is a better hypothesis.

Cool, so I can just go asking whatever questions?

Well, not quite.

Why’s that?

Maybe I should have mentioned this in the Process section—there are two phases of reading you should do for your hypothesis.

Sometimes you still manage to ask trivial questions. Say you were writing a paper on math (you wouldn’t be, but I’m a math major, so bear with me on these examples) and you wondered “Could two perfect cubes add up to a third perfect cube?” because you’ve been curious about that.

You might think, “Great, now I’ll just turn this into Hypothesis-Answer form” and you go to look up the answer. The answer is that two cubes can never add up to a third cube. So you type merrily away at this paper of yours, until some math student walks by and tells you your paper is very uninteresting.

Why was it uninteresting?

Because any math major will tell you that what you’ve asked about is just part of Fermat’s Last Theorem, and your hypothesis is actually common knowledge to them. If you were writing this for a math class your peers would be awfully bored.

Not only do you have to avoid what is uninteresting for you, you also have to avoid what is uninteresting for your audience. And the only way to determine what will be interesting to your audience to do some research. You can’t quite just ask any old question for your hypothesis, you are expected to ask good questions, and to figure out what the good questions are you must know some things about the subject.

Comment

There are some things that, as a writer and as an individual, I cannot write an informative essay about. I cannot write about characterization, because every word I say is an uneasy echo of something I’ve learned from someone else. Style is similarly not my forte — I can only say that you need to be clear and direct, and that’s about it. But if there is anything I’m good at talking about, it’s the act of writing itself. I can tell you how to write, not in the sense of which way to organize your words, but how to break though your reluctance to start and get those words down when it’s do-or-die.

For most of us, weekdays begin with school or work. After that, you’re exhausted. You tell yourself, “Just wait until the weekend. I’ll have tons of time to write then.” Except that when the weekend comes, you are hesitant to start. You may not like your idea, or it may be hard to get into a set position. Maybe you get all set up, but something distracts you and you have to stop. Perhaps you do get something started over the weekend, and are enthusiastic to continue it during the week instead of slacking off. But then the workweek arrives, and school, jobs, and other things come calling. Without you noticing, writing sessions become rarer and rarer until your story lies incomplete and forgotten under a pile of papers.

Well, here’s the ugly truth: In life, you’re going to feel lousy a lot of the time. But there’s a defense against this. It’s called focus. Do you have a routine in which you write or read? Get that ready to put it into motion. Gather your materials, grab a snack, put on some music if that helps you, and go to where you write. Put your pen or pencil to your paper, or your fingers to your keyboard.

You have everything set up. The page lies blank. But just what do you write? Several things can hold you back here. You might be afraid that what you write won’t be the best you thing you could put down even though you have a story in mind. Conversely, maybe you don’t have a story in mind to write about yet. Or perhaps you have a story in mind and have an idea on how to write it, but you aren’t satisfied with your ideas.

With the first barrier (you have an idea but don’t know how to put it into words), realize that there a lot of different ways to express yourself — a lot of good ways, but a lot of bad ways as well. Just for the moment, think of ways you could present your story if you’re in that situation. From the first sentence to paragraph to page, to first scene to chapter to major event. Just think. Even better, think with your pen or computer. Write out ideas, and if you’re lucky, one of your ideas will expand. Finding way of presentation that just plain works for you can give you the boost needed to get into your story. The key here is to not be afraid to experiment – - you may go through plenty of angles that don’t work before you find one that does.

The second barrier (you want to write, but you don’t have something to write about) requires brainstorming as well, although of a different type. The foundation of this type of brainstorming is asking questions. “What if” is a common brainstorming question. What if the sky rained cats and dogs? What if the things in my house turned into animals, from my computer mouse to a real mouse to a pillow into a sheep? Okay, some corny ideas maybe, but you get the idea. “What if” is something you can apply to anything. That’s its flaw as well as its virtue — some things just can’t be made into a story. So while you look for a workable idea, be aware that this method will cough up a lot of garbage in addition to the occasional gem. Write it all down, because even a “what if” that at first sounds ridiculous can later turn out to be a great premise.

Another brainstorming question you can ask is, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” Be careful with this one, because you don’t want to put elements into your book for no purpose beyond their coolness. When an idea is included that doesn’t contribute to your characters, plot, or world building, it will ultimately detract from your story as a whole. But this is different. Instead of being used as extra fluff, “wouldn’t it be cool if” is shaped into a main idea. So your reader isn’t wasting their time on pointless events or gadgets, but reading important events that just happen to be totally awesome.

The last barrier (you have ideas on what to write and how to write it, but aren’t comfortable with them) is a big problem for me personally. When your idea just doesn’t interest you, it’s hard to invest the time and effort needed to write it. Coming up with long lists of possible topics is easy; the world is full of ideas things to write about. But ideas and words you can love, that might be hard to come by.

Writing things you want to write about can help clear this ailment. Maybe you don’t even have to change your story idea. Maybe you just have to tilt the focus of text to show what someone else in your story is thinking or doing. Ever read a book where much of the action is behind the scenes? If you think those behind the scenes pieces are interesting, you can write them so that the audience can see them. If you enjoy writing it, it’ll probably be more interesting than the thing you forced yourself to write. Just by unrestricting yourself from things you told yourself to do but have lost enthusiasm for, you can write more effectively because you want to write. (This is one of the reasons I tend to disregard outlines. Not because it might make the plot of a story seemed forced, but because it forces me to write it. Sorry, I’m just not feeling up to writing the scene I decided to write five days ago. Can I take a sick pass?)

Even the coolest sounding ideas can feel stretched thin once you actually start writing them. For example, being a boy wizard is cool, but if there’s nothing important about being a boy wizard it gets boring fast. In fiction, we can add the things that matter in order to make cool things deep as well. A boy wizard who has friends he cares about, friends he doesn’t just do dangerous things with, but also can actually just hang out with—_that_ makes the life of a boy wizard worth living and the boy wizard’s magic worth doing, just like friends in the real world give us a reason to get up and start our days. Giving your characters motivation will in turn give you motivation to write about them and your reader motivation to read about them.

When you want to write, that’s when exhaustion from school and work can be tossed out the window. It really helps your chances of getting into a productive mood if you actually want to write. Tell yourself, “I can write. I will write. I want to write,” and you can do it.

Now put your pen to your pad or your fingers to your keyboard. Get going and start twisting time and space.

Comment [6]

In this article I’ll briefly go over the general structure of a short story, give some miscellaneous advice, and present a writing exercise.

Structure of a short story

Short story is a literary form that has a well defined structure. Of course, aspects of this structure can be modified, and I’ll go into that in more detail once I explain the general structure.

There are two sort of forms I have seen short stories take.

Freytag’s Triangle

One form is your nice and familiar Freytag’s Triangle, named for Gustav Freytag. The structure is as follows:

Exposition

In exposition you are setting the scene. This is where you introduce the reader to the location of the story, and to the actors who will be involved. This is your classic “in a small kingdom long ago” section. Exposition is important because it gives your reader an idea of what is going on. Without a good idea, you risk losing your reader to confusion. I’ll illustrate using an example of Virgil’s revisions (hope you don’t mind) of The Tower.

Compare Draft 1 to Draft 2

One is much more confusing than the other. What was the difference? The difference is now there is exposition to set the scene, and introduce the speakers.

Rising action

Rising action is where the story starts to kick in. This is where you introduce the conflict in the story. This section is pretty self evident. You’ll know it when you are there, because it’s the part questions start to be raised.

Climax

Also known as crisis, turning point. Turning point is actually the best description, although Climax is the standard terminology. The climax is the turning point of the conflict—not necessarily the big fight or something. An example of this is Hamlet. What was the climax of Hamlet? Some might guess the big ballroom fight where everyone dies, since surely that was a climax. Actually, the climax was in Act III when Hamlet has a turning point in his conflict (Man vs. Self) and decides to take matters into his own hands, now that he has the confirmation he wanted.

Falling action

Falling action is where the aftermath of the turning point happens. This will be pretty self-evident as well. After the turning point, the character has changed, and the falling action demonstrates what the changes have done to the character.

Dénouement

Dénouement is the tying up of loose ends, and release of tension and anxiety. It should give the reader a feeling of closure.

Caveats

These parts of the triangle do not come in discrete packages, more often than not. They bleed together very naturally.

The natural narrative

Another school of thought is the natural narrative hypothesis proposed by the linguist Labov. The natural narrative structure is thought to be the way we naturally tell stories, and the short story is a modified form of this more general structure.

Abstract

The abstract is a summary of what the story is about. This is often seen in our everyday story telling “This one time at the mall, Mike got owned”, but not used as often in short stories. You still see it in some stories like, “I remember the time Mitch’s bike was stolen”.

Orientation, Complicating Action, Evaluation, Result

These are basically the same ideas as in Freytag’s of exposition, rising action, turning point, falling action.

The evaluation is important though, and the explanation is different enough from that of turning point to be worth expanding on.

Evaluation is considered by Labov to be “perhaps the most important element in addition to the basic narrative clause.” By evaluation, Labov means “the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative,” [to justify the claims in the “abstract”]. “Evaluative devices say to us: this was terrifying, dangerous, weird, wild, crazy; or amusing, hilarious and wonderful . . . that is, worth reporting.” [1]

Coda

The coda is where the narrator indicates closure, as in “And they lived happily ever after”.

Modifications

Obviously, I would say about a majority of short stories forgo abstract and coda, and that’s a perfectly valid thing to do.

Elements of a short story

Miscellaneous thoughts

You short story should involve a change in the character. Either he overcomes a challenge, or he is overwhelmed by it. Whatever the case, he should change. His perception of the world, or the way he acts within it should emerge changed. A good short story illustrates a transformative experience in the character’s life, no matter how trivial the event. Maybe the main character is simply observing two butterflies frolicking and mating, when suddenly a prying mantis snaps one of them up. Is this short story worthy? Sure, if you describe it well, and show the impact if had on someone’s life.

Great short stories often involved self discovering. Write on a topic you don’t know everything about. A lot of people use the phrase “write what you know” as advice for beginning writers—fine, but Ms. Schumacher had a good point as well. When you do know about the circumstances surrounding an event, or everything about a topic, you are an expert and the things you write really are like articles. You know more than the reader, and you are giving the reader exposition. When writing about a topic where you are as equally knowledgeable (or ignorant) as the reader you are brought down to their level, and you have to explore the topic together. Good writing should feel like an adventure, and exploration into the unknown. As a writer, if you are trying to find your way through the story, the process of exploration will really show. One of the striking things about Schumacher’s story The Private Life of Robert Schumann is that we feel like we are unveiling a mystery along aside the characters. I think trying to capture the moment of discovery in a short story is very akin to trying to capture the occasion of a poem—they are the same concept.

Through the process of uncovering the truth your character will experience change—and your reader will be pulled along, after all, we want to know the truth too.

A good short story character should be changed by the events unfolding around him, but he shouldn’t be passively subjected to fate. Make him fight back. Nobody entirely lies down and takes a beating that life gives. Show this. It’s fine if he is eventually defeated and gives up, but you have to show him breaking. Maybe breaking was his transformative experience, and he now realizes how correct the nihilists were all along. It could make a great story if you write it well.

Types of conflict

Man vs. Self : The main character struggles with himself or herself: with his or her soul, morality, physical limitations, past choices, etc. Example: A beggar debates whether to take the wallet he sees on the ground.

Man vs. Man : The main character struggles against the opposing goals, actions, beliefs of another character. Example: Two political candidates vie for office.

Man vs. Circumstance : The main character struggles against fate, or the circumstances of life facing him or her. Example: Alexa wants to be a doctor, but has to drop out of medical school to help her alcoholic sister.

Man vs. Group : The character struggles against the ideas, practices, or customs of other people. Example: A lesbian couple wishes to marry in an extremely conservative society. What’s more, they don’t want to hide it.

¹ http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pcraddoc/narhand1.htm

Comment [13]

The first page is a real bore. We get two paragraphs of pointless description of the landscape surrounding Helgrind, which is boring and unoriginal. Paolini uses such fresh metaphors as “bowels of the earth”. Another paragraph is spent explaining how Eragon was transformed into a super elf.

Next, CP makes one the silliest and awkward sentences ever.

“This group moved with many strange and varied gaits—they limped and shuffled and humped and wiggled; …” (p. 1)

Ah yes, humping. A viable mode of transportation for cripples all across the world. Eragon avoids using magic, afraid the priests of Helgrind might detect him. In other words, he is avoiding a fight with a group of cripples. You might think this is honorable, although the language he consistently uses to degrade their existence shows otherwise. He is simply afraid of the priests.

Now we get some needlessly detailed reports of Helgrind ceremonies, which include some really bad sentences.

“Half of the young men gave their frames a vigorous shake when they stepped forward with their right foot, producing a dolorous cacophony of notes, while the other half shook their frames when they advanced upon the left foot, causing iron tongues to crash against iron throats and emit a mournful clamor that echoed over the hills.” (p. 2)

This sentence has 57 words, 79 syllable, and 5 abstract words that don’t make good images. Awesome. There are far more like this, but I’m skipping description from now on, so I can get to plot points faster. But I had to quote this terrible dialog.

““Gar!” said Roran in an undertone. “You failed to mention that those errant flesh-mongers, those gore-bellied, boggle-minded idiot worshippers were cannibals.”
“Not quite. They do not partake of the meat.”

More pointless description of the Helgrind ceremony. This only serves to introduce us to an acolyte who cuts off his own hand. This will undoubtedly be the villain who “likes laughing, but not in a good way”.

Then Eragon uses his amazing telepathy to detect the presence of minds in the Helgrind, and they make a lame plan to attack.

Comment [7]

Eragon manages to turn a compelling moral dilemma, whether Murtagh still has good in him, into a boring, unrealistic, and uncompelling moral dilemma.

Also, Saphira is a psychopath.

“Cruel and deceitful as they may be, but I am impressed that the Ra’zac can bewitch their prey into wanting to be eaten. They are great hunters to do that. . . . Perhaps attempt it someday. But not, Eragon felt compelled to add, with people. Try it with sheep instead. People, sheep: what difference is there to a dragon?“ (p. 11)

Description of how Eragon is now using a staff instead of a sword to fight, because he can’t stand not having the feel of Zar’roc. This description is unnecessarily long, like the book. It’s lucky for Eragon he will receive a sword from the Vault of Souls ala Arthurian legend, then.

Oh yeah. And Hrothgar dies. Except that Eragon doesn’t care. And neither do we, because none of the characters form an emotional bond with us.

Eragon has a fit when he remembers Murtagh stole Zar’roc from him. Saphira has to comfort him, like some sort of little kid.

Gigantic flashback to the far preparations in the Varden, and how Eragon ended up on his expedition.

They display extreme paranoia at random noises.

Eragon and Roran reflect back on how they’ve had to kill lots of people. Instead of ever wondering whether a path of such bloodshed was a mistake, they just complain how annoying it is having blood on their hands. Conspicuously missing from the moral discussion here is doubt. They never ever doubt that they are on the right track, and doing the right thing. They just think that doing the right thing is difficult. And you know what? They are completely right, they are following the Great Plot Line, so of course they are in the right. Then Saphira has to spout her “wise” advice, which is stupid if you ever stop to think about it.

“Rising to his feet, Eragon walked to their saddlebags and retrieved the small earthenware jar Orik had give him before they parted, the poured two large mouthfuls of raspberry mead down his gullet. Warmth bloomed in his stomach. Grimacing, Eragon passed the jar to Roran, who also partook of the concoction.” (p. 19)

Couldn’t he have just said “Drank two large mouthfuls”? What he says isn’t even anatomically correct.

“Several drinks later, when the mead has succeeded in tempering his black mood” (p. 19)

Remember kids, use alcohol to deal with your emotional problems.

“The problem is, even though I can devise numerous spells to perform this one action, blocking those spells might require but a single counter spell might require but a single counterspell. If you prevent the action itself from taking place, then you don’t have to tailor your counterspell to address the unique properties of each individual spell.”

Now you might wonder, why is this important? So does Roran,

““I still don’t understand what this has to do with tomorrow.”
I do, said Saphira to both of them. She had immediately grasped the implications. It means that, over the past century, Galbatorix—
“—may have placed wards around the Ra’zac—”
— that will protect them against —
“—a whole range of spells. I probably won’t—”
— be able to kill them with any —
“—of the words of death I was taught, nor any—”
— attacks that we can invent now or then. We may —
“—have to rely—” (p. 19)

What is wrong here? Besides that the dialogue is stupid, a lot. CP has written a magic system which grants effectively infinite power to any trained magic system. It is amazing he managed to write himself into this hole, when his magic system is plundered from those of so many others. What CP now realizes is that, for his stories to even continue (and not end in a Eragon God-esque magic being conquering the world) he has to write in all these stupid exceptions, and effectively reinvent his magic system again.

Now, time for Eragon to explain to Roran how to defend against magic.

““Choose something—a sound, an image, an emotion, anything—and let is swell within your mind until it blots out any other thoughts.” “That’s all?”“ (p. 23)

That’s all indeed. This is awfully reminiscent of the way you ward off Dementors in Harry Potter. Fun stuff.

Stupid digression to explain the meaning of true love, as it relates to Roran and Katrina. Give me a break. And then comes the disgusting admissions of love for Arya. Oh my. They still aren’t finished. They will talk about Paolini’s ignorant ideas of love for two entire pages. I say ignorant, because he is 25 and still lives with his parents. All of his females characters make it evident he doesn’t interact with the opposite sex often. Oops, no, four pages. Dawwww, Eragon can’t marry a mortal woman. The life spans and what not. This concept has been explored in much greater depth and interest by other authors. Of all people R. A. Salvadore tackles the idea better in his Drizzt Do’Urden series, with the tension between Drizzt and Catti’brie. Again, awfully similar. For shame.

Now, in a startling display of homo-eroticism between a boy and his cousin, Eragon and Roran strip out of their clothes to compare their bruises. No joke. Also, some of the most unrealistic male bonding dialogue ever. CP hasn’t done much of that either, it would seem.

“He removed both his boots, then stood and dropped his trousers” (p. 30)

Now Eragon notices just what bad shape his cousin is in, and uses his Deus Ex Machina ® certified magic to heal him. In gratitude, Roran taunts Eragon about his vegetarianism, tempting him with juicy meat. Nice.

More not so subtle hints that Murtagh might be in Helgrind.

“Comforted, Eragon gzed into the void between the stars and slowed his breathing as he drifted into the trance that had replaced sleep for him. He remained conscious of his surroundings, but against the backdrop of the white constellations, the figures of his waking dream strode forth and performed confused and shadowy plays, as was their wont.” (p. 35)

Another one of CP signatures descriptions of rest. These hail all the way back to Eragon. Verbose, pointless. He could just say “Eragon went into a sleepless rest, and dreamt.” Or something.

Comment [24]

“Blood from the fight on the Burning PLains still encrusted the once-shining corselet, and the combination of dried gore, sweat, and neglect had allowed blotches of rust to creep across the rings. The mail was, however, free of tears, as Eragon had repaired them before they had departed for the Empire.” (p. 36)

He has time to repair his armor, but not to wash or scrub it? Both sorts of maintenence are important in keeping armor. There is more description of the two putting on armor. Except Roran isn’t really described, because it is always “Roran oufitted himself in a similar manner”. Unlike when George RR Martin writes about equipping armor, this doesn’t feel quite as authentic. The kinds of armor they are wearing doesn’t provide enough pretection to be worth the trouble.

Eragon, Roran, and Saphira discover the illusionary entrance to the Helgrind.

“With a surge of her mighty thews, she abandoned the spur and fling the rest of her body after her head.” (p. 40)

Well, this passage is pretty infamous to other people who have read the excerpt. If you Google “mighty thews” among the other bad stories that come up are The Eye of Argon.

Long fight scene, in which nothing is described. Refer to this article.

“Raising his right hand above his head, Eragon cried, “Brisingr!“ and threw a roaring fireball toward the Ra’zac.” (p. 43)

So, I heard Dungeons & Dragons: 4th Edition is pretty indifferent. Anyone care to voice an opinion?

“The Lethrblaka blood… was metallic blue-green, not unlike the verdigris that forms on aged copper.” (p. 44) (Emphasis mine)

I hadn’t commented on this before, but Paolini is still suffering from thesaurus syndrome, and has the habit of using unnecessary large words. Also, you’ll notice “partake” and related conjugations is a favorite thing of his now.

“The Ra’zac struck again and again, but each time their weapons glanced off Roran’s amor or missed his face and limbs by a hairs-breadth, no matter how fast they swung their blades.” (p. 45)

Again, not so much a fight scene but a narrative of a fight scene. The difference is immense. I would also like to remark that blows do not simply “glance” off armor, as much as D&D loves to suggest it. You will still feel the impact of the blow through the armor. Imagine you are wrapped in a tin can, and someone is beating against it. You can bet your life that you will feel the impacts inside the cans.

“Eragon smiled. The cocoon of charms he had spun around Roran had dones its job.” (p. 45)

Oh never mind. Eragon just cast a lot of combat buffs.

“Out of the corner of one eye, Eragon wtched as a humpbacked figure leapt toward him, extending its leaf-bladed sword so as to impale him. The world seemed to contract around the thin, narrow point; the tip glittered like a shard of crystal, each scrath a thread of quicksilver in the bright light of dawn.” (p. 46)

Wow, just wow. You should never interrupt the flow of an action scene to supply bad metaphors. In fact, you should never interrupt the flow of an action scene, period. Of course, in this scene the flow was never really established.

“chitinous appendage” (p. 46)

Thesaurus strikes again.

“He feinted, beat the Razac’s blade, and, when the Ra’zac stabbed at his throat, whilred the other half of the staff across his body and deflected the thrust.” (p. 47)

Credit where credit is due. This is a decent descripion. Would probably be more effective as shorter sentences, however. Unfortunately, this is a flash of lucidity, before the rest of the fight devolves into narration once more. Or no, there is more. It’s so strange, the good stuff is embedded in a sea of crap, so the scene doesn’t work very well.

““You’re lucky,” said Eragon. “The sword hit a rib.” Placing one hand on the injury and the other on the twelve diamonds concealed inside the belt of Beloth the Wise strapped around his waist, Eragon drew upon the power he had stored within the gems.” (p. 49)

Belt of Belt the Wise: 21,000gp, +10 to int and wis. I also particularly dislike this part of the magic system. Seemed very random.

Fast forward to the end: They find Katrina and Sloan, after killing a single Ra’zac.

Comment [10]

Sorry for the delay. I had a good friend from out of state over, so I paused to meet with him. Anyways, back to Brisingr.

Eragon looks around in the cells, and finds Sloan sans eyes. He then spends a page and a half moralizing over whether he should kill Sloan or not. In fairness, this wasn’t too bad of a scene. What was bad is this part.

“Lifting his hand, as if in benediction, Eragon whispered, “Slytha.” Sloan’s manacles rattled as he went limp, falling into a profound sleep.” (p. 56)

Now, this is confusing, because CP has used the death as sleep metaphor so many times before, that this could be mistakenly read as Eragon using a deathspell. So his merry plan is actually to lie to Katrina and Roran, while keeping Sloan alive. Fun times.

Of course, they find Katrina.

Never taking her eyes off Roran, Katrina stood and, with a shaking hand, touched his cheek.
“You came.”
“I came.”

Heheh.

CP ruins what could have been a good scene.

“Drawing back, Roran kissed her three times on the lips. Katrina wrinkled her nose and exclaimed, “You grew a beard!” Of all the things she could have said, that was so unexpected—and she sounded so shocked and surprised—that Eragon chuckled in response.”

Paolini just ruined this scene by doing what was the equivalent of explaining a joke. I was going to feel good about this scene, or laugh myself, kind of, except that he ruined it.

A man and a friend are playing golf one day at their local golf course. One of the guys is about to chip onto the green when he sees a long funeral procession on the road next to the course. He stops in mid-swing, takes off his golf cap, closes his eyes, and bows down in prayer.
His friend says: “Wow, that is the most thoughtful and touching thing I have ever seen. You truly are a kind man.”
The man then replies: “Yeah, well we were married 35 years.”

It’s funny because the man isn’t attending his wife’s funeral, and because he hates her.

Aww, I sort of like Katrina. She is vulnerable, but doesn’t quite fall into the damsel in distress category. Besides the fact that she had to rescued by two buff men, but yeah.

Now, as a testament to how gullible Roran, Katrina, and Saphira are, Eragon tricks them. This is odd, because Saphira can read his thoughts. But he basically manages to get rid of them, so he can take care of get rid of Sloan, by saying he has to kill the last Ra’zac, and that there might be some secret plans in the cave. Saphira freaks out, as expected.

Comment [8]

“Come, O thou eater of men’s flesh, let us end this fight of ours.” (p. 64)

Shakespeare is doing gymnastics in his grave.

“My massster does not want me to kill you,” it hissed.” (p. 64)

Well, I had no idea it was hissing until you said so. I have noticed though, the sss’s have been toned down. They forgot to sss “does” into “doesss”. While I would call making the Ra’zac’s dialogue less ridiculous an improvement, here it is just inconsistent with their speech in the first book.

The inconsistencies continue. Sssee if you can count the number of times something should have been hissed but wasn’t. Really, this just doesn’t make any sense.

““No. If I fall to your staff, let Galbatorix deal with you as he will. He has more heartsss than you do.”“ (p. 64)

Not so subtle hint to the ending.

“Foolish boy.”

“She was my hatchmate. You have become ssstrong since we firssst met, Shadeslayer.”

What the hell gives? It’sss like only every other word gets to be ‘sss’d.

There is a lot more of this that I’m too tired to quote. But suffice it to say, the speech tag “hissed” is used loads more. Now the Ra’zac makes a perfectly reasonable request. That Eragon make sure that they are remembered. And Eragon refuses, seeing as he has no sense of history. No wait, that isn’t right, he has shown his interest in history numerous times over the past two books. So really, Eragon just hates the Ra’zac. Racism, how you make my heart shrivel. After being denied a perfectly reasonable request, the Ra’zac is understandably mad.

“Curssse you, Rider! I curssse you! May you find no rossst nor den nor peace of mind thisss land of yours. May you leave Alagaesia and never return!” (p. 65)

Of course, Paolini can’t help but point out Angela has already predicted this entirely. Except he manages to use the word “selfsame”, terrible.

“A mare’s tail of blood seperate Eragon from his enemy” (p. 66)

I don’t understand this sentence at all. I can’t tell if it is a metaphor or something literal or what. It just doesn’t make sense.

“Eragon batted the shaft aside with his staff.” (p. 66)

Jedi powers.

“Wiping his mouth, he yanked the staff free and whispered, “For our father. For our home. For Carvahall. For Brom. . . . I have had my fill of vengence. May you rot here forever, Ra’zac.”“

Needless duplicity in this list. Turns out, Carvahall was your home, and Brom was your father.

Now Eragon carries Sloan out of the caves…

“He blinked away the beads of sweat that clung to his eyelashes as he struggled to solve the problem of how he was supposed to transport Sloan and himself five thousand-some feet to the ground. “It’s almost a mile down,” he murmured.”

That first sentence is extremely awkward. Anyways, I always found it curious that CP has taken the time to “invent” four “languages” but not a different unit of measurement. Curiously Earth like. Also, I would like to note mountains that tall occur as a part of mountain ranges, and don’t stand alone as the highly improbable Helgrind does.

Now, Eragon levitates down the mountain. Although he nearly kills himself from overuse of Magick ® while doing so. Then he is saved by a bee?!

“The bumblebee was so vibrant, so alive, and so beautiful, its presence renewed Eragon’s will to survive. A world with that contained a creature as amazing as that bumblebee was a world he wanted to live in.”

Meanwhile, Arya heard Eragon was still alive, and committed suicide.

Then Eragon “kills” plants to restore his energy. Oh man, I’m never going to get tired of the way Eragon is a parasite.

Ugh, a whole page recounting the way his quest is finally over. We get it. And he walks off with his super elven pace, kidnapped man on his back.

Comment [14]

Hey everyone (SlyShy speaking), for this installment of EWW:Twilight we have a new team member, Kitty, bringing our team up to the MST3000 standard number of three. Of course, we aren’t very faithful to MST with the EWWs, but if you are interested in some stylistically faithful sporks, then you might be interested in Kitty’s site MST Dungeon. Enjoy chapters 11 and 12.

11. Complications

I noticed that he no longer angled the chair to sit as far from me as the desk would allow. (p.112)

LS— Aww, cute.
K— He’s warming right up to her. Wait, he can’t. He is marble.

LS— I bet you’d like to reach over and stroke something else, too, wouldn’t you Bella?

A crazy impulse to reach over and touch him, to stroke his perfect face just once in the darkness, nearly overwhelmed me. (p.112)

LS— Cream Count: 68

I was losing my mind. (p.112)

LS— How can you lose something that was already gone?
K— I like that he makes her crazy.
SS— Well, that was a given.

I realized his posture was identical to mine (p.112)

LS— Perfectly erect?

somewhere in his body never slackened. (p.112)

LS— If this last for over 4 hours, you need to call a doctor.

The overpowering craving to touch him also refused to fade (p.113)

LS— You know, There is a group called Sex Addicts Anonymous that may be able to help you out with this.

his eyes somehow managing to smolder (p.112)

LS— Yeah… About that… You might want to go see a opthamologist. Cream Count: 69
SS— His eyes are like little chunks of coal. True story.

I looked away before I could start hyperventilating. (p.112)

LS— Cream Count: 70
K— Hyperventilating. Really? Really, Bella? Really?

It was absolutely ridiculous (p.112)

LS— This book is absolutely ridiculous.

“Well, that was interesting,” he murmured. His voice was dark and his eyes were cautious.
“Umm,” was all I was able to respond. (p.113)

LS— How can his voice be “dark”? Also, Bella is smooth.
K— She’s got style, she’s got grace…
SS— Now that I think of it, Kristen Stewart portrayed Bella pretty faithfully. As in, she sometimes forgot her lines too.

LS— Really? It is getting that rough?

I stood with care, worried my balance might have been affected by the strange new intensity between us. (p.113)

LS— Balance Fail: 25
SS— What, is his love like an earthquake or something?

so fiercely beautiful that the ache to touch him flared as strong as before. (p.113)

LS— Cream Count: 71
K— “Let me grope you! You’re so pretty!”
SS— That’s the kind of plea that lands you in jail.

His skin was as icy as ever, but the trail his fingers left on my skin was alarmingly warm — like I’d been burned, but didn’t feel the pain of it yet. (p.113)

LS— What the hell does he have on his fingers?
K— Maybe hot sauce…?
SS— An IcyHot patch, maybe.

I walked into the gym, lightheaded and wobbly. I drifted to the locker room, changing in a trancelike state, only vaguely aware that there were other people surrounding me. (p.113)

LS— It seems like you are always in this “trancelike state.”
SS— She probably uses “recreational substances.” Like, apparently, Edward’s skin.

Reality didn’t fully set in until I was handed a racket. (p.113)

LS— Sorry to say, Bella, but I don’t think reality will ever set in for you. Because if it did you would notice that Edward treats you like a dog.

It wasn’t heavy, yet it felt very unsafe in my hand. (p.113)

LS— Balance Fail: 26

“Thanks, Mike — you don’t have to do this, you know.” I grimaced apologetically.
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep out of your way.” He grinned. Sometimes it was so easy to like Mike. (p.113)

LS— You know, he acts like this 100% of the time. And you still always treat him like dirt.
K— Poor guy.
SS— It’s okay, Mike deserves better than Bella anyways. He also deserves better than her friends, but whatever.

I somehow managed to hit myself in the head with my racket and clip Mike’s shoulder on the same swing. (p.113)

LS— I just noticed that SM never even tells us what game they are playing… Balance Fail: 27
K— It’s so endearing. I kind of want to hurl.
SS— Maybe I just have a poor imagination, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how she did that. I’m sitting here holding a racket in my hand trying to figure it out.

I dressed quickly, something stronger than butterflies battering recklessly against the walls of my stomach (p.114)

LS— This sounds pretty horrible taken out of context. It seems like Bella got knocked up in the first book, instead of the fourth.

Despite being handicapped by me, Mike was pretty good (p.113)

LS— Uh… You said you clipped him, that is hardly “being handicapped.”
SS— In The Twilight Zone (as Forks will now be known) a bruise counts as a disability, and you can use handicap parking whenever you have a headache.

his tone rebellious (p.113)

LS— How can his tone be rebellious?
SS— It’s trying to escape.

my argument with Mike already a distant memory. (p.114)

LS— There was no argument with Mike. All he said was that he didn’t like that she was going out with Edward, and she basically said “oh well.” That is not an argument.
SS— She wishes she had the thinking-on-her-feet skills to argue. Sigh.

What if his family was there? I felt a wave of real terror. Did they know that I knew? Was I supposed to know that they knew that I knew, or not? (p.114)

LS— Is it just me, or was that concentrated stupid boiling out of her mouth?
K— I know you know I know you know I know you know. It’s all very clear to me now.
SS— I’d be more worried about not getting eaten if I were you Bella. Or if this book was at all a real vampire novel with real live vampires.

LS— That is a new level of premature ejaculation.

his breathtaking face untroubled now. As I walked to his side, I felt a peculiar sense of release. (p.114)

LS— Cream Count: 72 (Literally?)

His answering smile was brilliant. (p.114)
His eyes burned with sincerity for a protracted moment — playing havoc with the rhythm of my heart — and then turned playful. (p.115)

LS— Cream Count: 74
SS— I’m sitting here praying you have cardiac arrest, hun.

“Um, it doesn’t help with the Charlie situation if an unexplained Volvo is left in the driveway.”
His smile was condescending now. “I wasn’t intending to bring a car.”
“How —”
He cut me off. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be there, no car.” (p.115)

LS— Another look at Edward’s amazing personality.
K— I think he’s kind of a dick.
SS— The Charlie Situation sounds like they have a secret son named Charlie that they are hiding from the world.

“Is it later yet?” I asked significantly. (p.115)

LS— Two things. First, that is a ridiculous question. Second, please, SM, do not tell us that something is significant. And how do you even do something “significantly”?

Flickers of the electricity I’d felt this afternoon began to charge the atmosphere (p.116)

LS— Oh, god, is this going to turn into a superhero book? Is she getting super powers? Welcome to the awkward and poorly written adventures of Electro-Girl and Sparkle-Boy.
K— “Look out, villains, I’ve got razzle dazzle!“

It wasn’t until my head started to swim that I realized I wasn’t breathing. (p.116)

LS— And by “a lot” I mean: Every fucking chapter.

LS— … Maybe she should see a doctor, this seems to happen a lot.

He smiled wider, flashing his gleaming teeth. (p. 116)

LS— Cream Count: 75

That night Edward starred in my dreams, as usual. (p.116)

LS— Literal Cream Count?

How ghastly it would be, I thought, shuddering, if Charlie had even the slightest inkling of exactly what I did like. (p.117)

LS— Would that be because he is a hundred-year-old sparkling vampire, or because he is a very creepy, controlling stalker?
SS— Lying to your parents: it’s a-okay!

perfect and beautiful to an excruciating degree. (p.117)

LS— Oh, perfect and beautiful. Cream Count: 77
K— It pains her to be around him. AHAHAHA — I don’t wanna do this anymore. Must…continue…
SS— This book is imperfect and ugly to an excruciating degree. I’m losing the will to live.

I couldn’t imagine anything about me that could be in any way interesting to him. (p.117)

LS— Would you like some cheese with that whine? (Yeah, I got that from my 1st grade teacher.)
SS— Well, she isn’t the only one who can’t. I wouldn’t even be friends with her.

I realized I’d never removed the CD Phil had given me. When I said the name of the band, he smiled crookedly, a peculiar expression in his eyes. (p.118)

LS— I like how SM didn’t even take the time to think of a band.
SS— The band’s name was Bella You Sure Are a Snob, which is why he smiled.

It continued like that for the rest of the day. While he walked me to English, when he met me after Spanish, all through the lunch hour, he questioned me relentlessly about every insignificant detail of my existence. (p.118)

LS— I believe this would qualify as stalker behavior.
K— “What’s your favorite color? Hm? Hm?“
SS— Does Bella even have a favorite color? Besides smoldering Edward Cullen’s eye, which is a shade of gold?
LS— Actually, she does say her favorite color is whatever color his eyes are.

“Tell me,” he finally commanded after persuasion failed — failed only because I kept my eyes safely away from his face. (p.118)

LS— Aww, it’s just so cute every time he commands her to do things.
SS— Make me a sandwich.

As soon as the room was dark, there was the same electric spark, the same restless craving to stretch my hand across the short space and touch his cold skin, as yesterday. (p.119)

LS— Necrophilia for the win?
SS— Premarital sex for the win?

this time with the back of his cool hand, stroking once from my temple to my jaw — before he turned and walked away. (p.119)

LS— Out of context it looks like Edward just kept his pimp hand strong all over Bella’s face.

Gym passed quickly as I watched Mike’s one-man badminton show. He didn’t speak to me today, either in response to my vacant expression or because he was still angry about our squabble yesterday. Somewhere, in a corner of my mind, I felt bad about that. But I couldn’t concentrate on him. (p.119)

LS— Is that what you need to tell yourself at night so you never figure out you are a horrible person?
K— Isn’t it always the way? The nice guys get screwed over while the hot, controlling guys get screwed…?
SS— It is, isn’t it? Mike, do yourself a favor and find a different girl. One who isn’t just using you for your badminton skills.

The pressure made me more clumsy than usual (p.119)

LS— Balance Fail: 28
K— How does she leave the house?
SS— I imagine she walks around in a large plastic bubble. That way nothing dangerous can happen to her.

eventually I made it out the door, feeling the same release when I saw him standing there, a wide smile automatically spreading across my face. (p.119)

LS— Wow, you really have a problem with that. They may have made a pill to help you.

12. Balancing

“And, of course, Jacob was anxious to see Bella again,” he added. Jacob scowled and ducked his head while I fought back a surge of remorse. Maybe I’d been too convincing on the beach. (p.122)

LS— Really? You’re actually regretting playing with a kid’s emotions?
SS— Bella, you manipulator…

I stayed in the front room after I carried the food out to Charlie, pretending to watch the game while Jacob chattered at me. (p.123)

K— Chattered at instead of chattered with. Awww.
SS— Stop talking at me! It’s really annoying.

I was really listening to the men’s conversation, watching for any sign that Billy was about to rat me out, trying to think of ways to stop him if he began. (p.123)

LS— Ah, back to the old Bella. No more remorse here, back to ignoring your “friends”.
K— Bella is mean :c

you said you were friends with the Newton kid. (p.123)

LS— “Friends” is not the right word for it. He is in love with her, while she tries to forget he exists. What would that be called?
K— Umm…a symbiotic relationship?
SS— Hmm, seems like a reverse-symbiotic relation, sort of.

“Dad!” I groaned. “He’s kind of dating my friend Jessica. Besides, you know I can’t dance.” (p.124)

LS— Another friend statement? (See above, it is the same situation.)
SS— “Dad! I didn’t sleep with that one, just all the other ones.”

I hurried so I would be ready to go the second Charlie left. I had my bag ready, shoes on, teeth brushed, but even though I rushed to the door as soon as I was sure Charlie would be out of sight, Edward was faster. He was waiting in his shiny car, windows down, engine off. (p.124)

LS— Ok, even if Edward may have super speed, his car doesn’t. It cannot teleport.
SS— It’s a sparkley car, so it can do everything Edward can. I’m beginning to think being a vampire has nothing to do with his strength. It’s just that he wears sparkles. I’m going to go be super strong now, by walking around covered in sparkle dust. Masculinity win?

He grinned his crooked smile at me, stopping my breath and my heart. I couldn’t imagine how an angel could be any more glorious. There was nothing about him that could be improved upon. […] I wondered if he had any idea how appealing his voice was. (p.124)

LS— Eww! My eyes were just covered in cream! Cream Count: 80
K— That’s astounding. Really. Just the amount of adjectives devoted to this guy…
SS— She has survived about 70 heart attacks now. Is there anything Mary Sue can’t do?

“So you never met anyone you wanted?” he asked in a serious tone that made me wonder what he was
thinking about.
I was grudgingly honest. “Not in Phoenix.” (p.124)

LS— No one was good enough for her, duh.
SS— “Not on Earth,” I said with grudging honestly.

His anger was much more impressive than mine. (p.125)

LS— By “anger” they mean “penis.” Otherwise this makes no sense. Although that would mean Bella is a man… And that Edward is gay. Well, the last part is understandable.

their beautiful, bronze-haired brother sat across from me, his golden eyes troubled. (p.126)

LS— Cream Count: 81
K— Look, he’s pretty.

Alice — her short, inky hair in a halo of spiky disarray around her exquisite, elfin face (p.127)

LS— She has an “elfin” face? What does that even mean in a story with no elves?
K— Wtf. Brain broke.
SS— Boy, the way she gets described it sounds like Edward should be infinitely more interested in Alice.

LS— Ooh, does Bella swing both ways? That would certainly make this story more interesting.

“Edward,” she answered, her high soprano voice almost as attractive as his. (p.127)

LS— Cream Count: 81

“Hello, Bella.” Her brilliant obsidian eyes were unreadable, but her smile was friendly. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

LS— Huh, maybe I should start a Cream Count for Alice.
SS— Is this why there are male Twihards?

“Don’t fall in,” he mocked. (p.127)

LS— Balance Fail: 29

My natural urge was to tell him to butt out. Instead, I lied brightly. (p.128)

LS— Oh, look, more lies. What a surprise.
SS— Not only that, she is able to enjoy lying now.

“Edward,” I emphasized, (p.128)

K— Look at all these other words for “said”. Smeyer must have really gotten cracking with the thesaurus.

“is not going to help me study. He’s gone away somewhere for the weekend.” The lies came more naturally than usual, I noted with surprise. (p.128)

LS— You were surprised that lying came naturally? You do that all the time.

Besides, since I’d come to Forks, it really seemed like my life was about him. (p.129)

LS— And this is the sad message that Twilight gives to it’s young teenage girl readers. “When you grow up, make sure your entire life revolves around your man.”
K— She even admits her life is about Edward? I am sad now.

I did something I’d never done before. I deliberately took unnecessary cold medicine — the kind that knocked me out for a good eight hours. I normally wouldn’t condone that type of behavior in myself, but tomorrow would be complicated enough without me being loopy from sleep deprivation on top of everything else. (p.129)

LS— That ended up sounding like a Viagra commercial…

LS— Oh great… Hey kids! If you fall in love, take drugs to make sure you are at the top of your game when you are with that special someone!

“What’s wrong?” I glanced down to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything important, like shoes, or pants. (p.130)

LS— Oh, I’m sure you would enjoy “forgetting” your pants around him.

why did he have to look like a runway model when I couldn’t? (p.130)

LS— Cream Count: 82
K— Because he’s pretty!
SS— We know who wears the pants in this relationship. Bella does. Literally.

I could hear a smile in his voice (p.131)

LS— … Whatever you say, Bella.

I tried to make the lie sound confident (p.131)

LS— Seriously… She is like a lie machine.

Five miles of treacherous roots and loose stones, trying to twist my ankles or otherwise incapacitate me. This was going to be humiliating. (p.131)

LS— Oh, Bella. Everything about you is already humiliating. Balance Fail: 30

I lied again. (p.131)

LS— Is everything that comes out of her mouth a lie or a compliment to Edward?
K— It seems so…

“That’s very helpful, Bella,” he snapped.
I pretended I didn’t hear that. (p.131)

LS— What a healthy relationship. This kind of thing seems to happen a lot.
SS— “This is very well written, Stephanie,” I snapped. She pretended she didn’t hear that.

His white shirt was sleeveless, and he wore it unbuttoned, so that the smooth white skin of his throat flowed uninterrupted over the marble contours of his chest, his perfect musculature no longer merely hinted at behind concealing clothes. He was too perfect, I realized with a piercing stab of despair. There was no way this godlike creature could be meant for me. (p.132)

LS— Oh. My. God. I think I’m about to vomit. Cream Count: 86
K— Astounding! We should pick apart Smeyer’s mind to see exactly what makes her think this is a good idea outside of a harlequin romance. … Hang on, she used “flowed”. BAHAHAHA.

I tried to keep my eyes away from his perfection as much as possible, but I slipped often. Each time, his beauty pierced me through with sadness. (p.133)

LS— Come on, when will it end? Cream Count: 88
K— Never.
SS— Usually when someone looks at you, they pierce you with their gaze, but here it is the other way around. You look at them, and they pierce you with their body, I guess.

Comment [56]

Behold our never completed project.

Reginald Timbleywick III didn’t feel it was ready to be released when we made it almost four years ago. I have decided that at this rate of working on it (once every never) we would not finish it, so I’ve decided to release it.

The lyrics are pretty racy inappropriate for any occasion, and the production (entirely my fault) is god awful, so please enjoy!

Comment [2]

Yesterday evening, I was rewriting my short story Broken Strings in light of Garrick’s critique, and I came upon a bit of a problem.

Much of Garrick’s suggestions included doing less telling and more showing through physical descriptions, like hand clenching for anger.

For example, one of his helpful comments was:

His stomach clenched. “what?” he stared at her, eyes widening in disbelief. He couldn’t have heard her right. Not Ala. “what did you say?” or something to that effect. Draw this out a little more.

I tried writing out the actions of the characters explicitly and what not, but it ended up sounding absurd. I generally agree with the idea, but in execution it seemed like I was over doing it. Francine Prose suggests that there is a balance between narration and description to be struck, and that physical gestures should be used in moderation.

“Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers—namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell Needless to say, many great novelists combine “dramatic” showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out—don’t tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams “yay” and jumps up and down for joy—when in fact, the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language.” (Prose, p. 24)

And also,

“Mediocre writing abounds with physical cliches and stock gestures. Opening a mass-market thriller at random, I read: “Clenching her fists so hard she can feel her nails digging into the palms o fher hand she forces herself to walk over to him… She snuggled closer to Larry as she felt his arms tighten around her and his sweet breath warm the back of her neck… She adjusted her cap as she crunched down the gravel driveway… Tom bit his lip.” All of these are perfectly acceptable English sentences describing common gestures, but they feel generic. They are not descriptions of an individual’s very particular response to a particular event, but rather a shorthand for common psychic states. He bit his lip, she clenched her fists—our characters are nervous. The cap-adjuster is way and determined, the couple intimate, and so forth.” (Prose, p. 210)

The issue I had, was that typical gestures were too generic, but also that the characters didn’t necessarily have their particular gestured reactions to some things. Maybe it is part of the character’s personality to hardly react at all to some things. So I resorted to telling. But that wasn’t the right balance, and Garrick was right to point it out. I had too much telling, and not enough showing. But the opposite end of the spectrum is equally bad. Too much showing and not enough telling makes everything into a poorly acted scene (where subtlety is lost). When we think about it, writing fiction is like story telling, which is narration. So we shouldn’t worship the Show don’t Tell rule. It might be a useful rule to the very beginner, who exclusively tells, and so finishes his entire story in a paragraph, but the rule is too rigid to be useful. The key is to find the right amount of each for the story.

More on this once the revision is done, and I can evaluate what was done with it.

Comment [2]

Welcome to my new column, The Physics of Alagaesia, inspired by The Physics of Superheroes. In this column I will be analyzing the feats of power and endurance that characters in the Inheritance cycle perform. I’m choosing them randomly, and without many picked out yet, so if there is a particular scene you would like to see me discuss, please feel free to mention it.

We are going to start out with a small fragment of the battle that takes place in Brisingr between Eragon and Arya against however many hapless Imperial Fodder Pawns. I’ll probably be coming back to this scene a couple of times, because it has a lot of hilarious, but I’ll focus on a single segment for the moment.

Trapped, he did the one thing he could: he struck the man in the chest with all his might. A fount of blood and sweat erupted as his fist connected. The blow staved in the man’s ribs and propelled him more than a dozen feet over the grass, where he fetched up against another corpse. (p. 114)¹

Calculations

Now, there are some things to note. This man is dressed in maille, and is a soldier besides. Let’s estimate the soldier at 200 pounds, or about 91 kg.² The maille would be around another 10kg.³ So let’s call the total weight a nice even 100kg. Let’s call more than a dozen feet thirteen feet, although this might be low, because that will come out nicely to four meters. We’ll want to account for the force of friction here, and we’ll assume the grass isn’t already slick with blood, in which case mu = .35 should serve as a reasonable guide.⁴ Let’s draw the free-body diagram now.

We want to know just how strong Eragon’s arms are, so we are solving for F_punch. Our first task is to determine what kind of initial velocity would be necessary to propel the soldier four meters. The deceleration due to friction is

g * mu = 3.5 m/s²

So we can solve the equation for initial velocity, v₀.

v₀ – 3.5t = 0
???

Here we encounter a problem. We need to know how long the man travelled before collapsing to the ground. The best we can do at this point is do some armchair calculations. We set up a second equation, describing the distance travelled.

4 = v₀ t – 3.5 t²

If we attempt to solve this for t using the quadratic formula, we’ll notice something. We only have real results when

sqrt(v₀² – 56) >= 0

Since I’m trying to favor Paolini at every single turn here, we’ll try and take the very lowest bound value. So, v ₀ = sqrt(56) = 7.5 m/s. Now then, let’s determine what kind of force Eragon needs to exert to accelerate a man to that speed.

Guesstimating that the impact time of a punch is a tenth of a second, although a much shorter duration is possible (in which case Eragon would be even stronger), then Eragon is exerting a force of

(7.5)/(.1)*100 = 7500 Newtons

Interpretation

So Eragon can lift 750 kg, at minimum, since our calculations assumed the lowest possible numbers everywhere we could. 750 kg is close to 1650 lbs, and this is with one arm. This isn’t the full extent of the our favorite Gary Stu’s power, of course. By adjusting numbers in our estimation, we could easily have him lifting 12,000 lbs, but we wouldn’t do that, would we?

Next time around, we will calculate how far Arya can jump, and why she should have been able to escape from Durza.

¹ Brisingr

² http://pediatrics.about.com/cs/growthcharts2/f/avg_wt_male.htm

³ http://homepage.ntlworld.com/trevor.barker/farisles/guilds/armour/mail.htm

⁴ http://hypertextbook.com/physics/mechanics/friction/

Comment [82]

I must admit, I’m always trying to practice poetry, because I’m a novice. One thing I find difficult is picking a topic to poem about, since I always want to pick the “right” topic. This is becoming easier now that I have a thoughtbook, but it’s still hard. To remedy I’ve begun forcing myself to write about something I don’t necessarily want to, and see where it takes me.

The way I do this is by randomly picking four objects that I have lying around. If you find yourself trying to consciously decide on an object, you could have someone else do it instead. As it happens, someone picked these objects for me: a partially consumed clove of garlic, a metal water bottle, a baseball cap, and a package of fishing line. My plan was to write two poems about one object, one where we don’t immediately reveal the subject, and one where we do. And then I would try a “narrative” poem about another object.

A pungent beast
the shrunken white flesh 

Its skin is flayed
thin pieces by piece 

A chunk removed
by prying fingers

Fragrant insides
flavored viscera

The clove is gone
thrown in a cauldron

I was pretty pleased with this poem. I liked the take on garlic, and without meaning to I achieved a consistent syllable rhythm in the poem: it goes 4-5, 4-5, and on.

The garlic sits atop a table,
waiting to destroy the monsters of lore. 
It is nearly as old as they are,
but they've all gone and faded
leaving the garlic with little to do,
but pass time as a seasonal spice.
Perhaps one day he will finally be used,
to vanquish evil or to decorate a chicken. 

This one I was less satisfied with. It seems identifying the subject directly allows a lot of my preconceived notions to enter the poem, which can take it down already familiar paths. Approaching the subject sideways and trying to avoid naming it gives a new perspective, by necessity.

Finally, the narrative poem.

Oh, to think of the thing I've held in me. 
Black coffee, hot enough to scold my plating, no creme. 
Tap water from that shady fountain, I can still taste the dust.
Tasty soup, but you dipped your bread, and in floated crust. 
Why do I remember all this, quite extreme?
For god's sake, do remember to wash me. 

This was sort of goofy… and yeah. So, this may or may not prove to be a useful exercise for you. I felt it got me thinking about poetry pretty well.

Comment [9]

A few days ago, I attended a talk by Michael Dennis Browne, a two time winner of the Minnesota book award. He spoke on a number of issues, but perhaps the most valuable was the concept of the thought notebook, which I will refer to simply as thoughtbook. Now, back to Michael Dennis Browne. He said that a thoughtbook is a way of capturing the prose and poems you have internalized and kept with you, but haven’t quite brought out yet. He keeps several of these in a year, usually about one a month. This technique won’t be useful for everyone. It’s useful for people who have trouble finding inspiration when trying to write.

The idea is simple, and we are all familiar with it on some level. We just make sure to carry with us a notebook, inside of which we jot down any ideas that occur to us. You probably do this in your school notebook already, when doodling in class. The point being, this isn’t hard to do. But doing it well is. You should be taking down any idea that you fancy as a writer. And I really mean every idea.

One thing you might have noticed about writing: when you sit down to write, your ideas disappear. Of course, this isn’t what actually happens. What happens is that you block your ideas, perhaps out of embarrassment. If you are like me, you want to write something worthwhile. And then you think of all the “worthwhile” things people have written. Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Joyce, etc. What you are writing now can’t compare, and that is stifling. It’s hard to write a story about elves and dragons in that light. (Actually it always is, because it’s so cliche.) So what should we do? We ignore the literary establishment.

It’s hard to consciously do this. After all, we all want to respect and well-liked, right? And we would love for people to appreciate our stories. But to try and write a story or poem because you think it will be respect is selling yourself out, and it isn’t creative.

This is where the thoughtbook comes into play. Whenever you have a creative or original idea, just write it down, and forget about it. Make it a ritual to capture whatever idea you come across. Your respectability filter isn’t active when you are doing this, so your creativity is allowed to flow. I would know, my notebooks are full of all sorts of disreputable stuff. (“like eragon except with zombie dragons…” and boy, does it get worse.) And this is actually great. The things you write down in that notebook are you. When you are passively observing the world, and writing down the thoughts it triggers there is a different sort of filter active. This filter is your interpretation of the world. You choose to ignore certain events, and pay more attention to others. Some strangers are more interesting to you than others. This is the constructive filter that gives each person a unique voice. Unlike the other filter which blacks everything out, this casts a nice you colored light on everything.

Your thoughtbook should be your source of ideas of when you are writing. This works surprisingly well for something seemingly scatterbrained. The first year I did National Novel Writing Month I was at loss for ideas. Part of it was I was trying to impress a girl with my participation, so I thought it had to be perfect, and of course, not embarrassing. But my lack of ideas was more embarrassing than anything, as the days passed and I hadn’t written anything. So I sort of flipped through my philosophy notebook and dug out some ideas. (This isn’t to say I didn’t pay attention to the ideas in philosophy. I find philosophy enthralling, which is part of the reason it inspires so many ideas.) I knew that I wanted to take the structure and reasoning of a typical ‘revenge’ story and flip it over until it got dizzy. But I didn’t really know how, or what details to include. From my notebook I found these tidbits:

1. A kitchen boy, trying to improve his life status
2. Murder covered up by framing a dragon
3. Crooked legal system
4. Rigid class segregation
5. Heartbroken/jealous girl’s father takes revenge
6. Tournaments as a means of elevation
7. Accidental murder
8. Diplomats/assassins/kidnappers/blackmailers

This actually led to a nice story, to which my writing didn’t do justice. In fact, I’m still trying to do justice to it, although the story has now become part of a far larger narrative. You can do all manners of wonderful things with a thoughtbook, I think, and it’s the ideal way to break writer’s block. Can’t think of anything to write? Go look for something new.

Comment [7]

Action sequences and fight scenes are a necessary element of many genres of stories, but they are also tricky to write. In fact, some published authors write terrible action sequences.

Mistakes

Let’s begin by examining a passage from Eldest.

The monsters had the advantage of surprise and quickly cut down four men, forcing the rest of the warriors, men and dwarves alike, to cluster around Ajihad in an attempt to protect him. Swords and axes clashed as the groups pressed together. Light flashed from one of the Twins, and an Urgal fell, clutching the stump of his severed arm.

For a minute, it seemed the defenders would be able to resist the Urgals, but then a swirl of motion disturbed the air, like a faint band of mist wrapping itself around the combatants. When it cleared, only four warriors were standing: Ajihad, the Twins, and Murtagh. The Urgals converged on them, blocking Eragon’s view as he stared with rising horror and fear. (p. 10)

So, as you might have guessed, this is a poor action sequence. I could make a long list of why this is so, so I will.

Lack of detail.

“The monsters had the advantage of surprise and quickly cut down four men.” How? How were the men cut down? How many Urgals cut down four men? Did they cut down four men in an organized thrust of halberds? Did a bunch of them just run in with machetes? The point of a fight scene to convey the movement of the fight to the reader. My mental image of this line, as it is written is, “Four Urgals step up together, raise their swords, and behead four men.” Real exciting.

“Swords and axes clashed as the groups pressed together.”

“but then a swirl of motion disturbed the air, like a faint band of mist wrapping itself around the combatants. When it cleared, only four warriors were standing” Have you ever watched one of those really old animated cartoons, like Tom and Jerry? Often when the characters got in a fight, you would see that cheesy dust cloud and an occasional limb, instead of the actual fight. This was for two reasons. Animating an actual fight is a lot of work, and animation was hard back then. And also because the animators thought some of the fighting was inappropriate for adults. It’s almost like this book was written in a really lazy way, and portraying actual combat would be too much work, or this book desperately wants to be a young adults novel, which I guess it is.

Sentence Length

In a fight scene sentences should be kept short. More on this later.

Bad Writing for Plot Convenience

Bad tactics. For battle trained warriors, these people demonstrate a stunning lack of tactics. Since it should be obvious that the urgal’s are trying to kill Ajihad his men shouldn’t be clustering around him. The Urgals start behind the men. So if Ajihad’s men really want to save him, they should form a line to block the Urgals, allowing Ajihad to run ahead and back to safety. But since Ajihad’s death was a plot device, it doesn’t matter.

Spacial inconsistency. “The Urgals converged on them, blocking Eragon’s view.” As I recall, Ajihad was already surrounded by tons of men, dwarves, and Urgals. Why is it that only now Eragon’s view is bad? Because him not seeing Murtagh and the twins escape is another plot device.

Now, let’s address some of these points, and see how we might be able to fix them.

Detail

A fight scene is all about conveying detail, but a different kind of detail than normal description.

Consider:

“Jaecyn avoided the sword. The sword was pure steel, wrought in steamforges before the plague, and it was decorated with gold leaf and emeralds. Jaecyn attacked.”

Versus:

“Jaecyn avoided the sword. Jaecyn attacked.”

Which do we prefer? The first conveys more information, but at a high cost. The flow of the fight is ruined by the description. In a longer description of a fight, where the tempo is established, this would stop the action dead. This actually applies to more than just action sequences. Generally long blocks of description disrupt the story.

Now consider:

“Jaecyn avoided the sword. Jaecyn attacked.”

And then:

“Jaecyn shifted his torso right to avoid the stab, and cut at Lord Strent’s extended arm.”

Again, we prefer the second choice. Instead of using the vague terms “avoid”,“attack” some of the actual movement is shown. This is the kind of detail that we need. However, this still isn’t where we want it.

Actors vs. Actions

When writing these scenes, verbs need to be attributed to the actors.

This has half of it:

“Jaecyn shifted his torso right to avoid the stab, and cut at Lord Strent’s extended arm.”

This is better:

“Lord Strent thrust his sword arm forward to stab. Jaecyn shifted his torso right to avoid the stab, and cut at Lord Strent’s extended arm.”

Now the action is actually attributed to someone, and it isn’t just mysteriously there. Now we have a problem, the sentences are long and clunky.

Even better:

“Lord Strent thrust his sword forward to stab. Jaecyn shifted his torso right to avoid the stab, and cut at the extended arm.”

For the purposes of imagining this scene, we only need to know Jaecyn shifted right, and not something slightly different and more specific. This cuts down on clunky-ness in the sentence. Further, now that the action is clearer, we don’t have to signal that an action is made to “attack” or “Evade” or such nonsense.

“Lord Strent thrust his sword forward. Jaecyn shifted right, and cut at the extended arm.”

This still isn’t perfect, but we will stop here for the moment. We will further refine this in part two of the article.

Part two will include timing, sentence length, keeping track of the environment, and the larger picture.

Comment [8]

Yesterday I attended a talk by narrative poetry specialist, Katrina Vandenberg, published author of two books of collected poetry. She gave six specific points of advice for writing narrative poetry. I can’t do her justice, because her points were very well illustrated by poetry, which I am unable to reproduce. Apologies.

1. Start in the middle.

The same advice that is given about long fiction applies to narrative poetry. Start somewhere in the middle of your story, and involve your reader in the main action. This acts as the attention hook. The reader (sucker) has no choice but to read the story when he is stuck in the action. Narrative poetry is usually shorter than short story or other narrative style, so it is important to get right to the punch. There isn’t any time to introduce the story, you have to skip that, and start in the middle. What happens before hand should be hinted at by the unfolding events, but they have to remain in the background.

2. Shake up the truth.

Basically, don’t be afraid to fudge events when you want. A narrative poem doesn’t come with a guarantee of truth, and you should take that artistic license and run with it. Think the story would be better if things happened a different way? Then go ahead and do it that way. Narrative fiction is about getting to the heart of the idea through your depiction of events. If you needed the waiter to have been rude for your narrative about a diner to work, then do it.

3. Think about how you were wrong.

When looking for topics to write a narrative poem about, look back on your life and think of events you truly regretted. Maybe you never got to say goodbye to a close friend when you moved away, and you fell out of contact.

4. Write to someone specific.

This is related to #3. When you think of the situation you regretted, write to a specific person in that incident about it. If your grandfather died, and you never got to thank him for your favorite toy growing up as a child, then write a poem to him about that. This serves a lot of purposes. It gives your subject a reason. It also injects another person into your writing.

People are interesting, and we read stories because we like reading about interesting people. Poetry is the same way. Characters we can identify with, or at least, enjoy observing ensure our rapture in the poem. Even the most abstract poem has an implied person, that is, the author viewing the object. Beauty is found through the observation of it. Without a person to witness it, a falling star has no aesthetic value.

So really, when we come to read a poem, we are coming to either hear from a person, or hear about a person. And this is why it is so important for us to mind the reader, and ourselves. We have to communicate through the barrier of paper and ink, to get the message across. Her suggestion that we write our poem to a specific person, real or imagined, forces this connection. The reader becomes aware of this other person, that you address your poem to, and this draws their interest.

5. Be a likable narrator.

In narrative poetry, you too are a character in your poem. You are another person to attract interest in the poem. Of course, it is important that you do more than just be a person. You have to also be a likable person, then the reader will stick around to hear what you have to say. Ms. Vandenburg suggested writing from the perspective of the sidekick, because the story isn’t all about the sidekick. That way when the story about the hero is narrated, we don’t have a narcissistic hero narrating his own accomplishments. That is what his sidekick is for, and we can sympathize with his sidekick, because in real life we aren’t always in the spot of attention. We know what it’s like to be on the side watching someone else, and it is easy to relate to that person. Maybe you are the wingman for the guy who gets all the girls, and you could write about that.

6. Let images do your work.

You can imply the existence of people, or the happening of events through simple images. Have a line about uncorking champagne? It can be inferred that there was a party. Have a lipstick stain on your forehead? You can bet there was a girl, unless you happen to like smearing make up on your face.

Comment [1]

Writing Action Sequences (Part 2)

Action-Reaction

Fight scenes are nothing if not Action-Reaction. The name should be pretty self descriptive. We are pretty familiar with this concept already.

Lord Strent thrust his sword forward. Jaecyn shifted right.

That was an action-reaction sentence.

Jaecyn shifted right to avoid Lord Strent’s thrust.

That was not an action-reaction sentence, because we placed the reaction before the action. This is something you’ll want to avoid, because it disrupts flow. If you have a series of action-reaction sentences and then suddenly you pull a reaction-action things get thrown off. The reader should see the reason for the reaction before the reaction. Thus action-reaction.

Action-reaction plays an important role in portraying a fight. The person with action is implied to have the initiative in the fight, as the other person is reacting to his movements. When the direction of the battle switches, ie. someone takes the initiative you break the paragraph, and then continue with the action-reaction sequence.

Changing Initiative

Strent chopped down. Jaecyn raised the chair, and caught the sword in the back of the chair. Strent raised his sword and tried again. The wood splintered, but this time the sword stuck in the chair. Jaecyn twisted the chair, trying to wrench Strent’s sword out of his hand.

Observe the first two action-reaction pieces. “Strent chopped down. Jaecyn raised the chair” and “Strent raised his sword and tried again. The wood splintered”. Even though in the second action-reaction, Jaecyn’s action isn’t explicitly stated, his action is implied. But then the underlined next sentence begins with an action by Jaecyn—he has gained the initiative here, and the following paragraph will involve Jaecyn’s actions and Lord Strent’s reactions.

Interruptions

This is another way initiative can be stolen. When the first person has the initiative, but is interrupted during his action.

Jaecyn drew another three, but Strent chucked a china plate at Jaecyn. He ducked as the china exploded over head.

Here Lord Strent has gained the initiative, he turned what was going to be Jaecyn’s action into his Action-Reaction. Jaecyn is forced to react to his interruption.

Caveats

There is a caveat here. For concurrent actions, the action-reaction model doesn’t exactly work. You’ll still want to start with the action of whoever has the initiative, even if they are happening at the same instant. This can help preserve flow.

While Lord Strent swung, Jaecyn lunged forwards.

In the larger context of several action-reaction models, this doesn’t sound at all out of place. The important thing is to be mindful of the way words can change the time frame we view things in.

Lord Strent cut, Jaecyn stabbed.

Sounds like they are taking turns.

Lord Strent cut and Jaecyn stabbed.

Sounds more like they are acting in the same moment. I’ll use this to lead into a discussion of time flow.

Time

Time in fight scenes can be kind of tricky, because there are two interactions. On one hand, sentence and clause length functions as an indicator of time.

He cut.

Sounds like it happened faster than

He twisted his wrist in an elaborate circular motion to cut.

Doesn’t it? This is why the following is a bad passage,

“ Out of the corner of one eye, Eragon watched as a humpbacked figure leaped toward him, extending its leaf-bladed sword so as to impale him. The world seemed to contract around the thin, narrow point; the tip glistened like a shard of crystal, each scratch a thread of quicksilver in the bright light of dawn.

He only had time for one more spell before he would have to devote himself to stopping the Ra’zac from inserting the sword between his liver and kidneys. In desperation, he gave up trying to directly harm the Lethrblaka and instead cried, “Garjzla, letta!”

It was a crude spell, constructed in haste and poorly worded, yet it worked. The bulbous eyes of the Lethrblaka with the broken wing became a matched set of mirrors, each a perfect hemisphere, as Eragon’s magic reflected the light that otherwise would have entered the Lethrblaka’s pupils. Blind, the creature stumbled and flailed at the air in vain attempts to hit Saphira.

Eragon spun the hawthorn staff in his hands and knocked aside the Ra’zac’s sword when it was less than an inch from his ribs. The Ra’zac landed in front of him and jutted out its neck. Eragon recoiled as a short, think beak appeared from within the depths of its food. The chitinous appendage snapped shut just short of its hood.” (Paolini, p. 46)”

Those two bold sentences are the Action and the Reaction. Remember, it is Action-Reaction, not Action-awholelotofotherstuffthatjustgetsintheway-Reaction. With so many words there, that felt like the world’s slowest leap and thrust, didn’t it? In fact, everything in this scene seems to happen in slow motion, as the Action-Reaction is constantly being delayed by words. You job as a writer should be to cut words, not to add them. Any word isn’t essential to the understanding of the scene should be cut, so the action is crisp and clean, not so cluttered. I’ll use that to lead into our discussion of description.

Description

Let’s revisit a but of that excerpt.

“Out of the corner of one eye, Eragon watched as a humpbacked figure leaped toward him, extending its leaf-bladed sword so as to impale him. The world seemed to contract around the thin, narrow point; the tip glistened like a shard of crystal, each scratch a thread of quicksilver in the bright light of dawn. “ (p. 46)

This is wrong. The description interrupts the narrative flow, is terrible, and isn’t appropriate for an action sequence. There are only two kinds of description that are appropriate in action sequences. There is the kind you would remember in the heat of action. Imagine you were in the middle of a bull run in Spain. What would you notice in the moment? Probably the flashes of red, the smell of sweat, and the shouting. In fact, these are the things that you can describe if you must. Color, smell, and sound. Perhaps feel, if appropriate. These are the things someone in the moment would be capable of observing. In the middle of a bull run, you won’t have time to compare the red of the headbands and cloaks to flowing blood and the lips of your lover. If you have that kind of time, it’s probably because a bull has trampled you, and you are dying. Poetic imagery isn’t for survivors.

The other kind of appropriate description is anything important to the reader’s understanding of the physical circumstances.

Jaecyn drew another three, but Strent chucked a china plate at Jaecyn. He ducked as the china exploded over head.

Here the description of china plate is acceptable as a description of the physical properties of the plate. It won’t simply clatter like a metal plate would.

Jaecyn drew another three, but Strent chucked a china plate at Jaecyn. He ducked as the plate exploded over head.

It could be argued that once you add the second paragraph you could remove the china descriptor, because the fragility of the plate is now implied. However, I kept it in as an indicator of status. As always, there are exceptions to rules that can be made.

Use the Environment

Far too often, fights just happen in generic open spaces, and the author gives no consideration to how terrain might effect a fight. The fight we read above from Brisingr is purported to be fought in a cave, but this is never an important fact. Are the characters’ movements ever constrained due to the low space? Do people ever use chokepoints in tunnels to make sure they are double teamed? No, no. There seems to be infinite space in this cave, because these enormous Godzilla-esque lizards are prancing around in it. Saphira is getting attacked by two Lethrblaka. If she backed into a narrow tunnel, only one would be able to fight her at a time.

You should always keep your setting in mind when choreographing a fight. High ground is useful for people who leverage that advantage. A fight on a staircase will only feel like a fight on a staircase if you keep aware of the inherent dangers present. One false step and you could tumble to your death.

Putting This Together

I’ll go through the process for writing a fight scene.

It’s important to keep your characters in mind, so I’ll give some background. Jaecyn has just returned from an exile imposed in large part by the Strent family. Although he is suspicious, he cannot afford to offend, so he attends a feast hosted by the Strent’s to “celebrate” his return. Lord Strent has other ideas. Jaecyn fights with a smallsword, primarily used for quick thrusts. Lord Strent comes from a traditional school of sword fighting that favors using a cutting weapon to deliver a single fatal stroke. He uses a broader blade to cut. Jaecyn has the advantage of reach and quickness here. The battle takes place in a feast hall, so the long table will be the center piece of the action.

Jaecyn was the only one in the hall. He sat at the head of the long table, across from the entrance. For the time, he enjoyed the food alone. Lord Strent strode into the room. Jaecyn saw the black scowl on his face, and stood up from his chair, alarmed. Lord Strent drew his sword, and now Jaecyn was sure. I can’t say I didn’t expect this.

He approached from the right. Jaecyn circled, keeping the table between them. As they circled, Jaecyn got closer and closer to the doorway. He glanced at the open door. Lord Strent saw the look, and dashed for the doorway. Caught off guard, Jaecyn sprinted, but Strent got there first. Lord Strent cut, and Jaecyn had to slow and scramble back to avoid being hit. Strent slammed the door shut while Jaecyn regained his footing and drew his smallsword.

“Please let me leave,” said Jaecyn.

“I don’t think so.”

Lord Strent charged, holding his sword low. Jaecyn rapidly backtracked. Strent swept his sword in an upward arc. Jaecyn braced; intercepted with the forte of his sword. His sword was nearly swept away as the cut swung past. Lord Strent rushed past, and turned to charge again. As Strent approached a second time, Jaecyn vaulted over the table, knocked over a jar of wine, and landed on the other side.

“Coward,” said Strent as he faced Jaecyn across the table.

“Better than dead, at any rate.”

Strent tried to cross the table, but Jaecyn threatened. Strent cut, and Jaecyn stepped back as Strent bumped into the table. He lunged and thrust his sword forward. Jaecyn sidestepped, and struck Strent’s outstretched arm.

“Agh!”

Strent grimaced, then grabbed a chair and lobbed it. Jaecyn hesitated. I should duck. Strent jumped onto the table, kicking aside several plates of fowl. The chair struck Jaecyn and he managed to avoid injuring impact by catching the chair. Strent hopped down and faced Jaecyn. Reeling slightly, Jaecyn took a step back. Strent chopped down. Raising the chair, Jaecyn caught the sword in the back. Strent raised his sword and tried again. The wood splintered, but this time the sword stuck in the chair.

Jaecyn twisted the chair, trying to wrench the sword out of Strent’s hand. He twisted back and the sword broke free. He readied another attack, but Jaecyn pushed the splintered back of the chair into his stomach. He staggered, as the breath him. Jaecyn took this chance to dive across the table, flying into all manner of puddings and utensils.

He landed with a half tumble and tried to ignore the broken piece of bowl he landed on. Standing and drawing three daggers, he threw them. Strent roared as one glanced off his forehead and left a long cut. Another struck his left shoulder, and stuck.

Jaecyn drew another three, but Strent chucked a china plate at Jaecyn. Jaecyn ducked as china exploded overhead. By the time he got up Lord Strent was already across the table, scattering salad bowls in his wake. Jaecyn lost his composure, he panicked, there wasn’t enough time to think.

Snarling, Strent cut vertically. Jaecyn tried to sidestep, but there was no space. As the stroke bore down Jaecyn was forced to block, and he was driven to his knees. Strent swung at Jaecyn’s neck. Jaecyn tumbled backwards and away.

“Why are you trying to kill me?”

“You murdered my son!”

“It, it was an unfortunate accident, for all of us.”

“This’ll be an accident too, you bastard.”

Lord Strent charged. Stubborn. He wants to deliver the deathstroke. Jaecyn grabbed a heavy cauldron and flung it in his path. There was a flash and a crunch, and Strent was on the floor screaming as the hot soup scalded him. Jaecyn jumped forward, landed on Strent’s stomach. Amid the soup he saw a bulging adam’s apple and slashed at it. Blood ruptured from beneath the covering of soup as Strent gurgled.

When Jaecyn finally stood, the blood intermingled with the overturned soup. The red blended and swirled in the soft cream. He breathed heavily, trying to regain his composure, but as he breathed in the savory smell of the soup the sharp stench of blood overwhelmed. He held his breath, trying to avoid it, but it was too much. He heaved up the meal he had just eaten. He fell to his knees in exhaustion. And there was Lord Strent, dead, amid what had been a perfectly good clam chowder.

Comment [11]

What doesn’t work

First let’s take a look at something Brendan pointed me to.

Where to Find Thousands of Great Character Ideas… FREE

What if you had a magic “idea box,” and when you opened it up, character ideas just started pouring out? What would that do for your writing? If you had a magic idea box, you could:

Produce rich, 3-dimensional characters that readers will remember, because you will make readers laugh, cry, and feel for your characters.

Cut your writing time in half (or better), because you’ll know exactly where you are with each of your characters and exactly how to deal with any obstacles that arise.

Permanently overcome a major source of “writer’s block” not knowing how your characters fit into the story.

Virtually eliminate the frustration of creating characters and the fear that your characters will never be good enough.

Increase your writing prowess, and earn kudos from other writers.

Exercise your creative muscle, and make yourself more creative.

Write fictional characters that people want to get to know and to talk about.

Create characters that intrigue and excite you.

The magic “idea box” is for real. There actually is a writing tool that can help you do all these things. It starts with something every writer needs, and something you may even have already started. I’m talking about a character journal. A character journal is a long list of character traits. Whenever you need an idea, you go to the journal, and it helps you find the right character trait.

But a tool accomplishes nothing unless one knows how to wield it. And that is the secret to creating winning fictional characters with this tool, how to cash in on your character journal. Once you grasp this truth, you’ll appreciate that ideas really are only worth a dime a dozen, because you’ll have more great ideas coming to you than you ever thought possible.

As hard as it is to come up with great ideas, the raw ideas are actually the easy part. The hard part is taking those ideas and turning them into a story. Because even if you had all the ideas in the world, ideas can’t write your story for you. Only you can do that.

That’s why I’ve compiled this brand new PDF ebook, 1001 Character Quirks for Writing Fiction, with much more than just a list of character quirks. It includes:

1001 Character Quirks ready to use in real stories.

The single biggest mistake writers make with quirks, and the secret to using them effectively.

10 ways to enhance character with quirks.

12 techniques you can use to generate your own character ideas.

8 tips on how to multiply quirks, so you can turn these 1001 quirks into 2000, 3000, 10000, or as many as you want.

A 3-stage character-development process you can use to create realistic and interesting characters.

A quick-list of 35 questions you can ask to give your character depth, and which questions not to ask.

A simple, 5-step writing process you can use to turn any character into a story, even if you’ve never written a story before.

An actual fictional character, soup to nuts, including a snippet from a finished story starring the character.

Numerous concrete examples and enlightening anecdotes.

Free downloads of future editions of the ebook.

This is an $8.34 value, because the core is a list of 1001 ideas, and ideas are a dime a dozen. So, 10 cents per 12 ideas, times 1001 ideas… Actually, it’s worth more than that, because it’s a tool you use to generate your own ideas, as many as you want.

But I’m giving a copy of this ebook away for free to anyone who orders the How to Beat Writer’s Block audio course using the links below.
Exclusive Writer’s Tips e-Newsletter… FREE

Yes, I’ve posted numerous tips and tricks on BeTheStory.com. And I pop my head in from time to time at the online writer’s boards. But I reserve the best writer’s secrets I know, simply because it’s too much work to distill them into a usable form. But…

Now I’ve started an exclusive Writer’s Tips e-Newsletter, full of storytelling tips, tricks, secrets, and exclusive offers, delivered by email and only available to my customers. I created this it for people who order my writing resources. But I’m offering a free subscription to the Writer’s Tips e-Newsletter as part of this offer.

The e-Newsletter is delivered safely and conveniently by email. In these emails, you’ll discover:

7 storytelling goofs, and how to avoid them.

How to use personality profiles to improve your characters.

How neurological research can make you a better storyteller.

6 psychological triggers that are important to storytellers.

Why different people like different parts of the same story.

New products and special offers for writers.

… and more.

I like how it begins with claiming you can find thousands of character ideas FREE and the rest of it tries to sell a product. So does it sound like a scam? Yes. Does it sounds like a male enhancement ad? Yes. To be honest, it was the second thing that really made me wary of this claim. That and that it is an utter scam.

What a character is not

A character journal is a long list of character traits. Whenever you need an idea, you go to the journal, and it helps you find the right character trait.

A character isn’t a cobble together mess of personality traits. If your character is, frankly, your character is flat and cliche. Here are some of the “great” characters you might get out of picking some adjectives.

Tim is Shrewd, Timid, Zesty, and Boisterous
Kim is Courageous, Offensive, and Dim

Ah great, do you have a good feel for any of these “characters”? Probably not.

Oh, but according to the thing, this is because we forgot to give out characters a quirk from the big listing!

Tim is Shrewd, Timid, Zesty, and Boisterous. He doesn’t like the color purple.
Kim is Courageous, Offensive, and Dim. She sometimes picks her nose in public.

I can see them becoming more like people and less like a collection of words you got from a list! Do those quirks sound stupid? Does it seem like I’m unfairly setting up a strawman? Maybe his quirks are actually good. Let’s see.

• 59. Always breaks things, trips over things, etc.
• 138. Rude to everyone.
• 217. Tall, but envies those who are short. (Or the reverse.)
• 291. Never asks for help; always tries to do everything himself.
• 376. Lives to role-play.
• 459. Names and becomes attached to stuffed animals, caterpillars, rocks, raindrops on the window, etc.
• 564. Can’t swallow pills.
• 645. One day each week, instead of working in the office, takes his laptop and works in the park, coffee shop, etc.
• 724. Agrees quickly (by silence), but later comes to a different conclusion.
• 809. Accomplished illusionist. (But uses this skill only subversively.)
• 883. Can’t stand to do the same thing day after day.
• 964. Loves sailing, motorboating, yachting, waterskiing, etc.

Wowee. If we have:

Tim is Shrewd, Timid, Zesty, and Boisterous. Agrees quickly (by silence), but later comes to a different conclusion.

Tim still doesn’t sound like a real person, poor guy. You know, it’s because real people aren’t really defined this way. Think about your best friend. If your experiences are at all like mine, you know this person very well. How did you get to know your best friend? You probably didn’t have this exchange with him or her:

“So what is your personality like?”
“I’m pretty fiery, but I stand up for my friends.”
“What are your motivations?”
“I want to destroy the dark lord, because he killed my parents.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“Tall, but envies those who are short. (Or the reverse.)”

At one point or another, your friend might have explained something about their lives, but you already know them really well by that point. And what is it really that you observed to learn who a person was? Their actions, and the little details of who they are.

Using what is around you

So I’ll tell you a secret at this point. There actually is a magic box you can pull characters out of. This is: the world around you! Basically, just keep your eyes out for different kinds of people and observe them closely. You’ll see lots of character inspiration.

In a story, you never want to describe characters outright in terms of their personality traits. You describe your characters through their actions and their dialogue. So the best way to get these is actually to just steal them from the people you see around you. The girl at the coffee counter who is always sticking her hand in the change jar while glancing over her shoulder quickly. The guy constantly checking his watch, even though he isn’t walking in a hurry—so okay, that’s me. In particular, I keep a sharp eye out for strides. The girl bobbing her head to music, even though her iPod is nowhere to be seen, and the guy behind trying to pass her, because her bouncy gait is too slow for him. The way people walk can say a lot about them. It’s ingrained into the human brain—we can identify the weak, the confident, the sneaky, and the predatory by the way they walk. When writing short fiction, you have limited room to describe your characters, so you have to find details that pack a punch. Ultimately, I’m reminded again of Chekhov’s emphasis on little details. You don’t even need to fully describe a character, just demonstrate one thing about them that stands out, and the reader will remember them forever.

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Introduction

This is adapted off a lecture I saw by Julie Schumacher, author of a number of critically acclaimed short stories (the one I’ve read is The Private Life of Robert Schumann). For some of you, this will sound pretty familiar—but that should be reassuring, because it means the stuff I’ve been writing about previously isn’t complete baloney. Goodness knows it could have been. So I feel vindicated by this. Anyways, she had some suggestions on short stories which will constitute a separate article, and four major points on characters which are following.

The Four Points

1. There is no place like home

As it turns out, you don’t have to look very far for great characters. Flannery O’Connor said (paraphrasing),

Surviving childhood is enough to write fiction

and I basically agree. Childhood is more or less a traumatic experience, since everyone seems to emerge from it as an adult. The Private Life of Robert Schumann is based on things that really happened in Schumacher’s middle school. Of course, she mixed things up with the addition of pedophilia, among other things. Pretty horrific stuff, made even more interesting because it is told from the perspective of children. So just look out for moments in your life where something was at all interesting, it could make for a great short story. What Schumacher specifically said, is that it is a profitable starting point for fiction.

2. Create vivid characters via details

Schumacher lead off with another paraphrased quote, from Robert Bly,

There is no route to the universal, except through the specific.

I’ve sort of touched on this before, so I won’t drag the point here. Schumacher had a simply excellent analogy for describing the difference between good and bad description though. What she said was, avoid the police sketch description. When trying to apprehend a criminal you certainly want to give a description like,

Middle aged white male. Approximately 5’11” and slightly stock. Blue eyes, brown hair, no facial hair. Has a prominent scar on his forehead, and is missing one of his front teeth.

But this has no place in a good description of a character. Physical details such as height, and weight don’t make your character who he is—unless it does, because there are always exceptions. If your character is deathly antisocial because he was so tall and skinny people called him a freak all through middle school, this is important stuff. This character still needs specific details though. He sounds like he would be nervous often, what does he do when he is nervous? Does he pull his hair, do a little dance with his toes, or shake his right hand randomly?

3. Write complex characters, not stereotypes

If your character is a stereotype, he needs rescuing. If your character is the average stock investor, or weight lifter, or computer nerd, your character will be helplessly flat. Real people are interested in a whole range of interesting things, and your characters should reflect this. What this means is that there is hope for your stereotyped character, you just have to make him or her more interesting.

4. Your antagonists must be compelling

For examples of films where this is used to great effect, see The Silence of Lambs and The Dark Knight. Your readers should say, “he was so horrific, but I couldn’t look away”. Your antagonist doesn’t necessarily have to be likable, understandable, or sympathetic so long as he is compelling, where you hate him but you still want to know what he does. That’s a powerful effect.

A writing exercise

Give yourself three minutes to think of three vivid details for a single character.

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This article is about irony in fiction, when you should use it, how it is used, and what cautions to take.

Convoluted introduction

I’m going to segue into the topic in a sort of roundabout way, so please forgive me. Let’s start by considering what makes an effective shock in writing. It’s very similar to what makes a joke funny, the shock when the punchline is unexpected. You don’t laugh at jokes you know (generally) because you already know what is coming. It’s said that the analysis of humor is the habit of the humorless, so I’ll just live with the dubious distinction of being humorless and do this. Humor follows this basic formula: Set Pattern, Reinforce Pattern, Break Pattern.

One day José, Marco, and blond Joe are taking their lunch break, on top of the unfinished eight story building the construction company is building. José opens his lunch box and exclaims, “Jésus, if I get a burrito for lunch one more time I’m going to jump right off this building.” Marco opens his lunch box, looks inside, and says, “Mamma mia, blessed virgin Mary, if I get spaghetti for lunch one more time, I’ll jump with you.” Joe opens his box, and groans, “Jesus Christ, if I get a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch one more time, I’m coming with you guys.”

The next day, José opens his lunch box, finds the burrito, crosses himself hurriedly, then steps off the scaffolding. Marco opens his lunch box, sees the spaghetti, and jumps off as well. Joe opens his lunch box, finds the cheese sandwich, and throws himself down.

At the funeral for the three men, José‘s wife is grieving. “If I only had known, I would have made him something different, like an enchilada, or taco.” Marco’s wife is also grieving. “I wish I had known, then I might have made him pizza.” Both wives looked over at Joe’s wife who says, “Hey, don’t look at me. Joe packs his own lunch.”

I think you’ll be more than capable of seeing the formula at work there.

So what is my point here? You shouldn’t be trying to write your stories like jokes, but shock is a powerful tool in fiction. When your story subverts your reader’s expectations, your story shocks, which is both memorable and enjoyable.

Irony as a literary device

Irony can only be used effectively when used with intent, so it is important to understand what irony is. Beginning writers can often mistake the meaning of irony, often what they really mean is oxymoron. So let’s define irony.

Irony: a literary device which presents a conflict between appearance and reality.

What this means isn’t entirely clear, so I’ll try to clarify by illustrating the three kinds of irony.

Verbal irony

Verbal irony is the kind we are most familiar with in daily life. This is often referred to as sarcasm. Verbal irony occurs when a character says one thing, but means another. The Sarcasm Society employs sarcasm in their slogan, “We would love to hear what you think”. Another example, from the book Guest of the Nation (whose title itself is ironic, because it is about an Englishman who is a NRA hostage), is “The Irish can say ‘go to hell’ in such a way that you look forward to the trip”.

Words of caution

It’s very easy and very tempting to use verbal irony in your writing, but there are two points to be aware of.

Fiction tries to recreate the impact of a situation. Saying something untrue to mean something else can accidentally remove the suspension of disbelief. Employing verbal irony creates a mental barrier the reader has to get past in order to understand the situation. The reader has to ‘get it’ in order to understand the scene correctly. Using irony poorly can simply lead to confusion on the part of the reader. Be careful.

Also beware of characters who are often sarcastic. This isn’t sympathetic, and if your character routinely uses sarcasm to belittle others, you’ve got to be very careful. Over do it and your character ends up being a jerk, and your reader stops liking him. Now, there is nothing wrong with unsympathetic characters, but if you want a sympathetic character, than you’d better watch the sarcasm. Make sure sarcasm is true to the character, and that it doesn’t alienate the reader.

Do know that self-deprecating irony can create very sympathetic characters though. Self deprecation is always a winning tactic.

Dramatic irony

Dramatic irony occurs when we know something that the characters don’t. The classic example is Romeo and Juliet. We all expected Juliet to reawaken, but to Romeo it appeared she was dead, and so he takes the poison. Appearance differs from reality, and we are aware of it, creating the dramatic irony in R&J. Dramatic irony is most often employed to create tragedy or comedy.

Dramatic irony is employed in Oedipus the King. We all know that Oedipus is the murderer he seeks, but he doesn’t. This dramatic irony creates suspense, as the reader tries to anticipate when he will finally learn the truth of the matter.

Situational irony

Situational irony is the subversion of our expectations to produce a result with a sick ‘rightness’. To use a slightly politicized example, Larry Craig, a long time opponent of gay rights, was arrested in the Minneapolis airport for soliciting sex, and it was later revealed he had participated in lewd acts previously.

Situational irony is also present in O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi, in which a girl cuts off her hair to buy her boyfriend a watch chain, and the boyfriend sells his watch to buy the girl a set of combs.

Conclusion

Five minute writing prompt: A daughter has been promised a trip to Alaska if she makes straight As, and she has been working towards this all year. The father has a gambling addiction, and gambled away the money he had saved for the trip. Now the daughter claims to have straight As, although she is lying. The father obviously doesn’t want to admit he lost the money. Write the ensuing scene.

If you followed the prompt you’ll note that the scene was either comedic or tragic, and whichever your’s turned out to be, it probably seemed to quite natural. Irony very readily leads to this. Irony should be a tool employed to create drama and interest in your story. Sarcasm used as a tool to belittle others should be used with caution.

Comment [24]

If you haven’t noticed already, these are just about my favorite thing ever. To tie in with my upcoming article on Setting, I’m presenting this collection of writing exercises.

1.

Prompt: A man just committed murder besides a lake. Describe the lake and surroundings through his perspective, but make no direct mention of the murder.

Purpose: Demonstrate the way character vastly changes perspectives of setting.

2.

Prompt: Two friends visit a rundown building in the slums. The first friend has been having hard times lately, and this building is his inheritance from his father. The second friend has just has the best day of his life. Describe the building through their dialog.

Purpose: Practice indirect description through dialog, and again, show the ways characters see setting differently.

3.

Prompt: Write a character sketch of animal that is not a common pet.

Purpose: Practice characterization through things besides dialog. Characterizing an animal can force you to describe the animal through its actions and movements.

4.

Prompt: Write a dialog between two characters where they grapple with a difficult issue, but avoid addressing it directly. An example would be a large family inheritance.

Purpose: Hopefully this illustrates some of the subtler aspects of dialog. People say a lot through what they don’t say, and other subtle cues.

5.

Prompt: Pick a fear of yours, then write about it coming true from a third person perspective.

Purpose: Some issues are hard to write about. It’s good to pick deliberately hard or sensitive topics as practice.

6.

Prompt: Write a craigslist or equivalent newspaper ad that your character might write.

Purpose: See how much about your character you can convey through things like what he wants, what he owns, or what he is looking for.

7.

Prompt: Describe the setting the moment a character steps outside, after being inside.

Purpose: Practice changing scene.

8.

Prompt: A friend of yours is wanted in four states for a crime. Then he shows up at your doorsteps and asks if he can stay a while. Write the scene where he asks.

Purpose: An uncomfortable conversation had better sound uncomfortable, or else you aren’t writing it correctly.

I’d love to hear any you might have. I’ve trying to build an extensive collection.

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