Losing the Cheese (Not "loosing the cheese")

I hate rereading my own material. I tend to edit when I am in a foul mood - or maybe it's the editing that puts me there. It is not a great feeling to go through your own work and think: "Wow. This is just awful." The scene that I had intended to be important was cheesy.

There are a few tests for cheesy:
1. Am I embarrassed for the person that wrote this?
2. Do I cringe when I read it?
3. Is the scene unintentionally hilarious?

The problem with cheesy scenes is that they are often important, or even critical, scenes. The scene cannot be cut, but it needs to be repaired, or redone. I have found a few principles that help remove the cheese.

1. Identify if the scene is important. An important scene is a necessary piece of the story you are trying to tell. If the scene is important, it should not be cut. If the scene is unimportant and riddled with cheese, you have the option of cutting it out entirely. An important scene can often be trimmed down to the critical points. Not all parts of a story need to leap off the page. Maybe the work can be done by a single paragraph.

2. Identify if the scene is supposed to be powerful. A powerful scene nudges, or full on shoves, the reader's emotion. These scenes are minefields. Good stories need powerful scenes. A book that inspires nothing isn't worth reading. So how does one inspire the correct emotions?

3. Character Perspective. The ability of people to feel empathy is your friend. Settle your third person narrative to a more personalized perspective for that scene. Have the reader view the moment through your character's eyes and empathy will do a lot of the heavy lifting. Heaven help you if your audience is comprised of psychopaths.

4. Less is more. This should be every writer's motto. Trim words, cut sentences, remove the unnecessary. Reinforcing the feeling that "this is a powerful scene" is going to hurt you. It breaks the magic of the moment. Get in, communicate the message, and propel the reader forward.

5. A Dose of the Expected. The scene needs to be true to the characters involved. It also needs to have reactions that would not be out of place in real life. Make your reader comfortable with the expected. If the scene has a different feel from the rest of your narrative, it will feel alien and forced. If the characters of the story show new sides to their behavior that are totally unexpected, it will push your reader out of the experience. The expected feel, flow and theme will keep your reader in the moment.

6. A Dose of the Unexpected. If nothing unexpected happens, do yourself a favor and limit the event to a paragraph or two. Predictable powerful moments are almost always bad. There are very few exceptions.

7. Fresh perspective. Get someone else to read your work and give feedback. Make sure this is a person that has taste. Make sure this is a person that will not try to spare your feelings.

8. Don't fear a complete do-over. Sometimes the scene needs to be scrapped and completely redone. Redo it.

Yes, We've Been Bad

It has been a very long time. In my defense, I have been getting my legal practice (Estate Planning - it's more fun than it sounds) off the ground and Pratt has been working like a fiend and raising his baby girl. But work on the book has continued, and we plan to have it completed by the end of this year.

Pratt added a large combat portion the other day. He had concerns that there were too many combatants and I told him to stop being such a baby. So... yeah. There were probably too many combatants involved in the scene, but I am hell-bent on keeping them all there. The wonderful upside of all the chaos was that one of the villains changed gender twice during the course of the fight. I suggested, not seriously, that a mid-combat sex-change must be some kind of magical side effect. Pratt texted back a single word in reply.

Overall things are coming together. I am trying not to look ahead to book 2, though I am desperate to get there. Though finishing up Book 1 along with all the necessary polishing needs to take priority. Well that's all for now, I have some law stuff to do.

More Insanity

If anybody is still reading this despite the lack of updates, you may have noticed that another contributor has mysteriously appeared. That would be Cormroc the Great, or just Matt. I have been friends with Pratt and Lio for a few years now. I met Pratt at school and then got to know Lio mostly through theorycrafting and number-crunching WoW with him.

I was brought on to the project to help with the technical side of the RPG. I am not a very creative person and don't have much to offer to the story side of all this. However I love games and game mechanics, and am a software engineer so I hope to be able to actually contribute to this project in these regards. From what has been explained to me so far there is a lot of potential for a fun and fairly unique game system here.

I am currently trying to recover from spending my weekend at GenCon, but hope to actually start offering diving into mechanics and start on the programming side of things soon. The only thing I can really promise for sure is that I won't be updating here more often than Pratt and Lio.

It's Been Too Long

It has been too long. Pratt and I talked about keeping the Blog active with frequent updates. Well you see how that has gone. On the bright side we have started work on the Table Top part of the game in earnest. So far so good. We intend to have it take place about 300 years after the events in the books we are currently working on. We have kicked around some pretty interesting ideas and hopefully we will have something we can roll out in the not too distant future. Pratt is looking forward to play testing. I'm just looking forward to finding out if people want to play it.

Sorry it has been so long since the last update, I was finishing Law School and preparing for and taking the Bar. Meanwhile Pratt has a family to worry about. Essentially that makes him busier than I am. In any case I will endeavor to do a better job of keeping this up to date.

Another project that is currently underway is my building a website called 7 Dorks. It's still looking for a visual artistic direction and the content is nothing special yet, but it's growing. Check it out at www.7dorks.com