Happy New Year, everybody. I meant, "!" not ".". That's fucking boring punctuation. So anyway, get this. I'm reading Story by Robert McKee? It's like changing my life, dude. Sincerely. I spent many a year studying Creative Writing in both a Masters and Bachelors setting and, yet, I never really figured out how to glue great prose (which I can manage often) into a coherent and extended narrative (which I can manage rarely).
"But, Ben," I hear you ask. "What about all the illuminating content you have on your site? I love all of it. How can you say that you're lacking as a writer? Have I mentioned how much I love it?"
"Yes," I answer. "You have. But look closely. The Middle Ages, my much loved serialized novel, is not finished, nor is it even close. My acclaimed Cashword stories? Mere snippets, glances at potential stories. I have, to date, completed around three short stories and gotten around thirty pages, max, into no less than four novels. This is no way to live, my friends.
And so, after enjoying Adaptation yet again, I decided to give McKee a shot. Well, holy fucking shit, friends. The man ever-so-simply describes how the key components of any good story, from Aeschelus to John McClane, work. It reminded me how because I missed one crucial day of Elementary School, I never learned how to really subtract numbers until the Seventh Grade.
You see, my friends, I never really learned about how to build a good story. Sure, I've seen and read thousands of them, but I have yet to write one! Do I regret my many years of CW Scholarship? A thousand times, no! My prose is glistening! Look at it! Now, though, I feel I am finally capable of strining together all of those beautiful prose gems into a captivating narrative, filled with drama and conflict. Filled, in fact, with Story. I mean "!".
March 31 is my birthday. By then, I will have completed a first draft of The Middle Ages. A novella with, this I swear, a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Sadly, you will see none of it. Such shame do I have in my well-painted flounderings, that I have decided to forego its serialization. Do keep an eye out for more Genre City and a pulse-pounding combination of my own masterful dabblings at Cashword stories, and the newly chic-chic 20 Minute Story, however. All this and more, this 2004.
Oh, and if you missed Comicraft's Once A Year gigantic font sale, you my friend, are a sucker.
Comments