Won Ton Jack

On moving, simplifying your life, and getting critiqued

Submitted by brian on Thu, 01/27/2011 - 00:41

It's been a while since I posted. I have more story to share (quite a bit more, actually) but there's a sizeable chunk of Chapter 3 that I have to finish polishing before posting it, and the rest of the story I have ready takes place after that. That's the danger of posting chronologically, but not writing chronologically - sometimes there's a gap. At any rate, my family is moving overseas, so we've been very busy sorting out our affairs for the hop across the pond, getting rid of furniture, selling our cars, and donating a great deal of stuff to those who need it more than we do. It is amazing how much stuff you amass while settled in one place for some time - lots of clothes, toys, books, CDs, DVDs, gadgets, etc... many of which you really don't need or even use. A good move can be a cleansing thing.

Regarding the story, Becka, a writer friend of mine here in Charleston, was very kind and critiqued the first two chapters of my book - I did the same to her own novel-in-progress, Fie Eoin. One thing Becka mentioned to me was that the story so far reads at a lower grade level than I had originally planned it for... that perhaps Lanny and his crew should not have reached high school yet.

I'm not sure what I think about this; I do like the idea of Lanny being in high school, but not yet of driving age, but I also don't want to put off the age group I'm trying to write for. I read in some book that young adults will read books about people who are older than their own age, but not often will they read books about people who are younger. That is to say that a 12-year-old might read a book about a 15-year-old, but a 15-year-old is much less likely to read a book about a 12-year-old. I might rather tweak the story to read a bit older, than to make my main characters younger - I'm also interested in capturing the interest of regular adults, though I want the book to read easy and breezy.

This will take some thought!

Write with others!

Submitted by brian on Fri, 11/12/2010 - 12:07

Last night I went to the local Barnes & Noble to meet up with a group of local writers here in Charleston, South Carolina. It's November, and this month as is every November is NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to complete 50,000 words in a single month - a difficult challenge!

I successfully completed NaNoWriMo a few years ago, but this year, as I was on vacation for the first week of November, I decided not to go for it again. Regardless, I'm always up for meeting other writers and sharing ideas and motivation, so I dropped by the book store for a NaNoWriMo Write-In.

It was a lot of fun to meet others interested in writing, and to pump each other up to meet difficult writing goals. We used the "Box of Doom", a tool that gives each writer a random plot element and a random number of words to write, and then challenges the group of writers to meet their individual goals. I wound up with the challenge of writing 2100 words in 30 minutes that I did not complete successfully, though I still received "NaNoWriMo credit" for failing the task (there's an achievement, for lack of a better term, for completing the task, and also an achievement for failing it).

While there turned out to be much more talking than writing during our Write-In, I still recommend getting together with local writers to talk about writing! It's extremely motivating to talk about writing and to critique the writing of others, not to mention very helpful for all of those involved who are interested in improving upon their craft.

How to create writing that is brief, to the point, and does not have a whole bunch of extra words in it that make it hard to read and draw the reader away from the action (like this title for example)

Submitted by brian on Tue, 10/12/2010 - 14:56

I've been working on Chapter 2 of my book, and so far it's coming along... slowly. The truth is, I already have a lot of exciting stuff written in there, including the introduction of my main antagonist, none other than Won Ton Jack himself. The problem is... the chapter is draggin' like Pete's Dragon.

One issue is that there isn't a lot of dialog in Chapter 2, and I like dialog. There's a little bit, but most of the chapter features my main character, Lanny, wandering around and doing stuff. Which isn't as exciting as Lanny wandering around and talking to people, and getting into bigger and better conflicts.

Last night I started tackling the problem by removing large chunks of text from my chapter. For example, check out this paragraph:

"Lanny cupped an ear against the front door to listen for the sounds of his father inside the house. Small flecks of chipped red paint stuck to his sweaty palm as he pressed his hand against the old wood. All was silent; he couldn’t even hear the TV. He checked his watch and frowned. At this time his father would normally be listening to the Mandarin language news program that started daily at 4:30 PM. That the television was off meant one thing: Lanny’s father was at this very moment standing less than two feet away from Lanny on the other side of the door, ready to unleash the rage. Lanny could easily picture his father lurking behind the door—his arms crossed, his face bright red and his mouth open and ready to yell so loudly at Lanny that the sheer volume of his voice would force the boy back up against the wall and make his hair stand quivering on end, just like in the cartoons."

The writing isn't too bad I guess... lots of intimate detail, and a bit of insight into Lanny's father's character - that he likes to watch the Mandarin news, and that he follows a predictable pattern when he's ready to rage at poor Lanny (that kid gets no breaks, trust me). The point I'm trying to make here is... I just spent a whole paragraph - 168 words - to say: "Lanny stood outside the door." Yikes! And a good portion of the chapter follows this same pattern.

I'm not sure how I'm going to overcome this problem. I want to offer description and color, and provide some details that will share interesting tidbits about my characters and their world, but not at the expense of slowing my novel down to a crawl and turning off my readers. I'm thinking there's a happy medium I'm going to need to find in order to make my chapter work, and I'm off in search of it.

So stay tuned...

This! No, that! No, wait...

Submitted by brian on Sat, 10/02/2010 - 15:57

There are two polarized schools of thought when it comes to writing novels.

School of thought number one's followers believe that you should plan out every single facet of your novel, create a detailed timeline, draft incredibly vivid character outlines, and generally decide upon everything there is to know about how you're about to write your novel before you write it. All that's left to do after that, is to put into book form everything that you already know.

The people who follow school of thought number two believe that when you sit down to write a novel you should start from scratch, begin to write what's in your head, and figure out the plot when you get there. Your characters will naturally build themselves during this process. As such, you may not even now how your story is going to go until you write it... in fact, your story may turn out to be completely different from how you envisioned it would be when you started the first chapter.

Usually, when the followers of these two schools of thought get together, a massive kung-fu battle erupts. School of thought number one fanatics usually start off the strongest with well-planned attacks and meticulous formations, but the warriors of school of thought number two tend to be more flexible in battle, rolling with the punches and coming up with ingenious countermeasures that they can stack up against the first school's carefully thought-out plans.

Most people are not true fanatics of either of the two schools. Most people tend to fall somewhere in the middle, planning out large swaths of their novel while leaving others to chance. When I write, I also borrow tactics from both schools. I generally know how this story is going to go, I know some of how my characters are going to grow from the first page to the last, and I even have a few scenes sketched out. I don't know everything, however, as at this stage in the game I want to practice my writing, not my planning!

The moral of this drawn-out post (sorry about that) is that things are going to change - perhaps drastically! - as I write this book, and when they do, I'm going to have to go back and rewrite chunks of what I've already written. When I do make these revisions I'm going to indicate in my chapter posts what those changes are, and perhaps why I made them. I'm hoping that this won't be more confusing than helpful, but I do want to reserve the right to do it if I have to!

Why write?

Submitted by brian on Fri, 10/01/2010 - 21:08

Writing is a lot like tennis. Actually, writing is not much like tennis at all, except for the part where you can't get good at tennis unless you play tennis, and you can't get good at writing unless you practice writing!

I don't know many people who have never played tennis who think that they can pick up a racket and kick some tail on the court. But it does appear that a lot of people sit down to write their first novel and think that their work is going to be the Next Big Thing. It seems to me that it's pretty much the same thing... you can't rock out at tennis without playing a lot of tennis, and you can't become a great writer without doing a heck of a lot of writing. In fact, John D. McDonald, some guy I've never heard of, once said that you need to write one million words before you really know what you're doing with the craft.

I used to write every single day when I was younger - pages and pages of a science fiction novel that turned into a trilogy! Or whatever word for trilogy means that there were five of them. None of it is publishable, and in fact it would probably be quite embarrassing if anyone were to find any of it and give it a read right now, but I'm sure I got a few hundred thousand words in there. A million? I've probably got a few words to go before I get there, so until then I'm going to write, and read, and experiment, and have fun.

Am I writing this book to get published? I'd love to publish a book, but only when I'm ready, and when my book is ready, and I'm not going to have any misguided notions that my work is there yet! So, no... not yet. But I'd definitely like to be on the road to doing so, and the only way to get on that road, is to write.

The story of Won Ton Jack

Submitted by brian on Sat, 09/18/2010 - 15:18

Within the pages of this site I will chronicle for you the evil escapades of the infamous Won Ton Jack, a man shrouded in mythology, mystery, and extreme facial hair. In actual fact the story I am about to recount revolves around a young lad named Lanny who, having been born to one of the Five Guardians by no fault of his own, is thrust into an intriguing world of Bad Times. That being said, most of us are not here to read about this Lanny kid, who we know nothing about. Most of us are here to read about Won Ton Jack and to figure out what murky shenanigans he's up to.

But anyway back to Lanny - as the story opens, Lanny is about to bring something very special - and also very smelly - to school. Won Ton Jack, on the other hand, probably never went to school a day in his life, except for maybe the school of TOTAL BADASS, but like I said this story revolves around poor Lanny. Pay attention here.