I used to write a long time ago, but then my painting took center stage and my writing was pushed into the background. My painting has since slowed and I still need another creative outlet, aside from my graphic design.
Design is my day job and the second outlet is what I do to let loose. Sometimes, graphic design can be very confining creatively. Most people think you can do whatever you want, but that's really not the case. Most of the time, you are designing within the confines of what a client wants.
Painting allowed me to do anything I wanted, including experiment. Because of the economic shifting that's been going on, I am currently unable to paint, so I've turned back to writing as a means of creative expression.
I write fiction. I seem to have no problem coming up with ideas to write about, but because I'm such a big planner, it takes me a while to get going on the actual writing, because I prefer to start when I have three things worked out.
- The outline is clearly defined and I always know where the story is heading
- The characters have names, associations, ages and jobs
- And the world in which they live in is built.
Mind you, my kind of fiction isn’t full-fledged science fiction or fantasy. I’d make a terrible god in attempting to come up with language and cultures without making some horrible modern-day reference slip-up, like the kind I always notice in movies and literature. For example, in the movie Gladiator or Troy (I forget which one), there’s a scene where the hero is speaking to the army; motivating them to follow him into battle. Their reaction is modern-day woop-woop-wooping. Really? 3,500 years ago, people actually did that? I doubt it. Or it’s the old Universal Translator argument in Star Trek. Not only can the aliens speak English, but they know slang and western idioms and verbal conventions. The problem I have in these things is that someone had to write that into the dialogue. Someone like me! These are not errors in continuity I'm talking about. These are mistakes that break the illusion and believability you are trying to create.
And speaking of Star Trek, have you ever noticed how all through the original series, TNG, and Voyager no one ever went outside on the ship to do maintenance or deal with an alien? That really bugged me. You’d think the hull would need some kind of attention. Whenever we saw it docked at a station, we saw machines dealing with it, but never any people until the fourth or fifth movie. In my mind, someone should have gone outside onto the exterior of the ship, at least once.
But getting back to world-building, you build a world and everything has to be alien... everything or it's not believable. They have to have their own culture literally removed from anything on this planet. That’s too much work for me. I enjoy the human drama on this planet, so my kind of fiction is taking a group of people and throwing something odd or strange in their midst and watching them react and deal with it. The fiction is their predicament; the reality is how they deal with it. So I guess it’s a sort of stylized fiction with a big hit of realism, because it’s the people that make a story.
So what am I working on right now? I’m working on two stories. One takes place in a small town. Something in this reality flexes and something else comes unraveled that changes people. They wake up with abilities they never had before. The story is about how they deal with it.
The second story takes place just outside of New York. It’s about a group of people that have been on this planet for centuries but they’re not quite like us. That’s about all I can say about that one without giving too much away. I’ll let you know more later. Maybe. :)
