A Colossal Task

So I’m thinking that I will finally start the revision of my 200-odd page manuscript that has been slowly mouldering in the depths of my hard drive. I haven’ t touched it for about two years, and it feels like it’s time. Over the past few weeks blogging consistently has made me write much more often than I have in the past, and has instilled in me some level of confidence in my own abilities as a writer. I’m finding it far easier to write, as though whatever muscle within my brain that controls writing has finally loosened up from years of knotted, tense agony.

When I was very young I wrote voluntarily, but somewhere along the way I stopped doing that and only wrote when people gave me reason to. My motivation moved from being external to internal, and I couldn’t really enjoy it anymore, even though people told me to keep doing it. It even grew to be an agonizing process at times, with me cursing myself for ever attempting something so draining and time-consuming. That’s how it was when I wrote the middle of the aforementioned manuscript. I had to force myself to write, punish myself harshly for failing to do so and reward myself lavishly for success in order to keep going. That’s no way to write. I’m glad that I did it in hindsight, but I really hated it at the time. That’s why this new feeling of ease is so pleasant. I’ve never been able to write so easily in my life.

Enough about that, meta-writing is probably a dull subject to read about at the best of times, and 250 words is where I’ll cut that portion of today’s post off.

Today I spent four hours with my two best friends playing an old PlayStation 2 game called “Shadow of the Colossus”.  If you haven’t tried it, I have to recommend it. While I don’t normally play video games very often and I try not to talk/write about them unless I have an audience that is interested, this game warrants an exception.

The reason that “Shadow of the Colossus” made such an impression on me is simply that the world created for it is beautiful. You may have noticed that I’ve recently been investigating the components that create a good story, and this game provides an excellent example of a beautiful world. The characters aren’t developed — in fact nothing about them or their backstories is explained, not even their names — but the forbidden realm in which you find them is glorious. The story is about trying to reclaim the soul of a girl who was unjustly sacrificed. Nothing more is explained. You don’t know why Wander (the main character, we looked up his name online) wants to return her to life, nor where they came from. All you are told is that the place Wander has taken her has the power to return her soul to her body if, and only if, Wander can defeat 16 Colossi: giant beings of enormous power that somehow prevent the resurrection of the girl. I still don’t know the girl’s name… hrm.

With this relatively simple premise the game throws you out into a beautiful, highly detailed landscape (keeping in mind that this is beautiful for it’s time, it won’t amaze gamers employing consoles more recent than the PS2). The world is full of ruins, shrines, and incredible landmarks. You can sense a history to it, some kind of hidden story that made things the way that they are. Who built all of these ruins? Where did the Colossi come from? So far, it hasn’t been explained, and it probably never will be, but that’s part of what makes the world feel so rich. There is a history to it, even if you don’t know what it is. The story is engaging, and defeating the Colossi is challenging on multiple levels, but the plot is far from the best I’ve ever encountered.

I’ve come to think that the three most important elements of a story are it’s characters, world, and plot. This way of thinking about stories tends to factor out HOW these things are told to the audience, and just examines the bare elements themselves. Most good stories excel at two of these three categories, and the greatest literary works often exemplify all of them. “Shadow of the Colossus” has poorly developed characters, an unremarkable plot, but redeems itself with the quality of the world in which it takes place and the elegance of HOW these three are actually implemented.

And I’ve rambled on about this game for 500 words now. Sorry if I’ve bored you. In short: try it out if you can, it’s great.

Compared to most of my other posts this is already colossal in scale, so I’ll leave off here. Farewell Internet, I shall return.

Today’s First Sentence: I never would have guessed that my glasses case is bullet-proof.

Note: I feel like this first sentence is grammatically incorrect, but I like it better as is. If you can actually tell me how it is incorrect I’d appreciate it. Grammar is not my strong suit.

Pursuing the Power of the Period

First Sentence: I learned quickly that bread-making gave you the same iron forearms that blacksmith’s apprentices brag of, but without the callouses.

Imagine with me a middle-aged man, perhaps at a 45. He lives alone on Briar Street, in a house that is slowly crumbling to dust around him. He was a professor once, at a college across the country, but he published an article that was too free-thinking for the college’s taste, and they paid his severance package. He was weeks away from tenure, and the article was meant to be the capstone of his academic achievement. Embittered by his treatment, he refuses the offers of smaller colleges seeking his teaching services, holding out for a better-known employer. The letters eventually stop coming. Living off of the meager gains from his few successful literary ventures, he sits indoors most days, drowning his bitterness in literary junkfood. Every once an a while he is again struck by the urge to write, but his decaying skills leave him frustrated with a wastebasket full of crumpled paper. What is the world like through his eyes?

Walking to the grocery store was always a pain for Absalom Craine, ex-professor of Literary Studies at Chapton College. He generally watched his feet, noticing the ongoing degeneration of the toes on his once-shiny leather shoes as they passed over the concrete slabs, feeling the heel on the left one flop slightly as the adhesive holding it in place slowly failed. He always kept a pop fiction novel in the breast pocket of his threadbare tweed jacket, which he would read occasionally while he walked, so long as there weren’t many people walking the other way about. When there were others on the sidewalk he would avert his eyes, not wanting to see their assessment of his rank scent and unkempt clothing written on their physiognomies. Physiognomy, a word retained from a past life in which he daily cast his line in the the depths of the English sea and pulled up monstrous words of great power to bedazzle or inform his reader, as the occasion required. He’d held on to a few of these words, painful and poignant reminders of what he had once been, tattooed across his mind in flame: exegesis, aviatrix, anhydrous, cacophonous, physiognomy. As he neared the supermarket he’d begin reading the gaudy signs pasted across the windows, their poorly written prose and unattractive grammar making him grimace, but drawing his eyes like the carcass of a dead fawn.

This was yet another writing exercise from “A Dash of Style” by Noah Lukeman. I’ve found them all to be helpful, and this was no exception. The challenge was to craft a character who thinks in very long, highly detailed sentences, and I feel that I’ve done alright with that. I really like this Absalom Craine, and will perhaps write some more about him later on. My next post will be the opposite, a character who thinks in shorter increments. I wonder how he/she will turn out. I suspect that I’ll write from a male perspective. I’ve been told that I don’t write very realistic females, and I have no idea how to go about repairing that. Perhaps there’s a guide on that somewhere?

That’s all for tonight, more soon.

Let the games begin!

I’ve had this blog for a few days and posted nothing. Then I conversed with a musician friend who described a kind of guilt that she has when she hasn’t practiced music at some point during the day and I realized that I feel that way all the time. This is half me trying to alleviate that sensation and half me actually writing just because it’s really pathetic to have only one post on a blog. Today will be a free-write, in which I ramble somewhat freely about whatever comes to mind first.

That being said, I’ve suddenly run out of rambling material. Material. Mat. Ma. M. Have you ever tried to picture the letter “M” as mountains? In the font in which I’m composing this, I really can’t. The two lines on the sides are totally parallel, and no mountain ever looks like that. It would be kinda nifty to be reminded of my mountain college every time that I saw the letter “M” written on a page, but that is going to have to wait… Sadly, it also doesn’t look like upside-down vampire fangs, which was my next thought. “M,” do you even look like anything? Am I really talking to a character? Why do we use the same word for “Characters” of stories and “characters” on a page? Where on earth does the relationship between those two come from? I know that English rarely makes sense, but this is kinda pushing it, don’t you think? Unless letters used to be tiny drawings of people in weird poses that over time were simplified to their current form. I wonder what pose you would have to assume to form a “W”?

I’ve been knitting a lot today. I’d like someday to become the Knitting Guild Association’s first male Master Knitter, but I simultaneously feel like I’m involved with too many things to even remotely feasibly get that done. I’m trying to become a computer scientist, something that, although natural to me, will likely require a lot of work and honestly should receive daily attention. I currently only think about CS when I have to, not because I don’t like it, but because I end up doing so many other things during my day. On top of that I’m trying to be a good writer, which really should also take up a good slice of time.

Being a Dungeon Master for D&D four nights a week is also consuming a lot of my leisure hours. I love D&D, but I’m starting to wonder about it’s role in my life. I feel like I should step down the degree to which I am involved with it in order to pursue some other interests. I just also feel a huge sense of responsibility for the group of players that we have here, and I don’t quite know what to do with that. Decisions, decisions…. I feel like I’ve written a lot now, even if I’m just deceiving myself, so I’m going to call it here. Goodnight internets, sweet dreams.