Jun 08

FPS Weapons Chart Interactive Map

This chart, measuring two metres wide and a metre high at print resolution, was developed over the course of five years with each weapon captured, isolated and finally presented in rough chronological order by hand. Upon completion, a single, full-sized chart was printed and donated to the Child’s Play Charity for their 2010 Auction Dinner fundraiser, where it generated over $500USD for the Seattle Children’s Hospital.

Two years after completion, a few titles which were missed by my initial research were discovered, thus proving it to be not quite as complete as it was intended to be. Despite this flaw, it remains the most comprehensive visual guide to the progress of the First Person Shooter on PC and represents a decade of ‘golden age’ gaming.

Permanent link to this article: http://novelgrind.com/uncategorized/fps-weapons-chart-interactive-map/

Apr 10

Timing is everything

Comedy has long claimed the phrase ‘timing is everything’, but the same applies to almost every facet of a novel. Broad strokes of this rule come into play with things like timing a book launch to cash in on Father’s Day or Christmas gift buying seasons, but that’s PR department stuff. Timing is everything when it comes to plot events and dialogue, too, and they’re more important to get right – I’d rather launch a great book at the wrong time than a poor book at the right one.

Of the two categories above, dialogue is probably the more commonly overlooked of the two when applying correct timing. Unless you’re Quentin Tarantino or you’re writing a 1960′s comedy/mystery starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, snappy one-two-one-two conversations simply don’t happen in reality, and character who only ever say just enough to progress the plot run the risk of being boring or one-dimensional. For example, when’s the last time you had a brand new concept explained to you by someone who knew it back to front and you understood it first go without asking any questions? It can happen, but more often than not, unless we’re talking to someone with experience in teaching, new concepts trigger us to ask questions in order to understand it based on our current knowledge. Back and forth and misunderstandings are a big part of human interaction. Using timing and flaws in dialog gives realism and natural flow to conversations between characters and reveals more about them. You do not, under most circumstances, want the dialogue to be tight and concise 100% of the time. What you gain in a shorter wordcount you lose in shallower characters. Breaking a conversation and not picking it up again can be a great way to force characters to interact on several occasions or hold important information back so the reader can guess or wonder about it for a while.

Timing is also regularly mishandled when dealing with plot events. Red herrings are a prime example, and when I use the term it can mean one of two things. Either: A) A deliberate misdirect targeted at a character or the reader to make them think something is important, or B) a deliberate misdirect to play down something that’s actually of vital importance. Setting these red herrings up and knocking them down (or out of the park if you’re writing a thriller/mystery) is mandatory, but playing with the timing of that sequence can make it much more powerful. Delayed gratification is one of the best ways an author can toy with the emotions of a reader. Some things you want resolved quickly because the red herring was just a delay tactic to allow the villain time to escape. Other things you want to drag out so the reveal is more shocking. The longer you can delay, the better. But don’t overdo it. If you’re shortening the time to payoff on a few random red herrings just to ‘mix it up’ you probably have too many. Try removing them altogether – not every event has to be a misdirect or a payoff!

Delaying also works with character arcs. Hard learned lessons are what changes people most of all, and few hard lessons are learned in a single sitting. We all know the hero has a fatal flaw he must overcome to defeat his nemesis, and predictably this happens just before or halfway through the final battle. But what if you delayed it even further? What if the red herring was that the hero hadn’t overcome the flaw, but the reveal was that he had overcome it and now knew that all he could hope for in the fight was to reveal the nemesis to be a fraud and turn his minions against him? We thought it was defeat but really it was sacrifice. This double-whammy approach can really help make your story memorable.

Finally, delaying is imperative when it comes to poetic justice and comeuppance. Delayed gratification is in full swing here, as the longer you can keep an antagonist antagonizing the hero unjustly, the sweeter the revenge will be. Putting people in their place, standing up to bullies and even good ol’ revenge have formed the base of many a novel and film, but abbreviated versions are peppered through the best novels to lend flavour to the story. Weaving long-running trust issues, brow-beatings or humiliating one-upmanship into the tale and carrying them as long as possible helps keep readers hooked. You can’t expect a modern reader to be carried by the single question of how the main plot will be resolved (not over a 200+ page novel), so you should squeeze a few shorter plot and character arcs in there as well – just don’t be in a hurry to resolve them.

Permanent link to this article: http://novelgrind.com/novel-writing/timing/

Apr 04

Story versus Plot

I’m a big believer in plot, but often I read books that only have a story. Sometimes this is enough. For short stories, fables and even some films, all you need is a story that allows you to properly present an interesting character and let it blossom into something that people ‘click’ with. It doesn’t matter how you hook a reader or a viewer, but once you have hooked one – you’ve got a fan. Fans are, in one way or another, the ultimate goal of every author. Fans mean sales and sales mean another contract. Fans = careers.

The problem comes when books or films that don’t have great characters are given only storylines to work with. A great example is the Walking Dead, where you have an ensemble cast of broken idiots shuffling about aimlessly, trying to progress a storyline as slowly as possible to fill a dozen episodes – Season 2 is incredibly dull. Why? I think it’s because there is no plot. Plot is when you take a storyline that goes from point A to point B and C and D and so-on, and then mess it up like cooked spaghetti until you have actions and consequences that run over the duration of the novel or series or film or trilogy. Plot is when you don’t see things coming. Plot is when a throwaway red herring becomes critical. Plot is when the audience guesses one thing and you go and do something shockingly different. Plot is foreshadowing. Plot is what turns a story into a character of its own.

An example of this would be to take Back to the Future and re-cast it. You’d have a great plot about changing the past, affecting the future and saving the space-time continuum. The plot is deliciously convoluted and, for all intents and purposes, as much of a character as Marty or Biff, who in their own right bolster and enhance the plot by being integral to it. The whole series works so well because of the synergy between plot and characters. Either element would work on their own (this is why there are animated series and spin-off series and comic series for popular franchises), but together they’re a juggernaut.

If you’re writing a novel or screenplay, imagine changing your entire cast of characters. Does a plot still hold together, or are your characters the real trophies in the showcase of your story. It may be what you want, but bear in mind that the most beloved of classic and contemporary works are likely to have a real plot rather than just a framing device for comic sidekicks and a few fight scenes.

Exceptions do exist, but we try not to talk about Twilight too much.

Permanent link to this article: http://novelgrind.com/novel-writing/story-versus-plot/

Apr 02

Hunger Games Review

As a novel, the Hunger Games was fairly compelling. It didn’t take me long to read it and I knew a few people who would also enjoy it. What hooked me was one part the (heavily veiled) history of Panem, another part was the games themselves and how they fit into this ‘new’ vision of a post-apocalyptic America. But what really kept me going was the weathering of abuses that author Suzanne Collins threw at Katniss. Some of them were fairly standard survival fare; being forced to kill and watching friends die are popular mechanics of the genre.

But the games are orchestrated and ruthless, and to survive, Katniss was forced to change who she was several times in order to give herself the best chance of winning; changes that could have easily broken her – or anybody else subject to them. Accepting help from the shallow hipster elite from the Capitol is a tiny death for her ego and self-reliance. Pretending to be the smitten crush of Peeta is a betrayal of her own emotions, and finally succumbing to those feelings and actually caring about Peeta enough to risk/sacrifice her life for his are a betrayal to Gale – and something she would never have done if not for the Games.

And herein lies the failing of the film. Without Katniss’ internal monologue to help us understand what she’s going through, the scene-for-scene re-enactment of the Hunger Games as written in the novel just isn’t as compelling as it should be. Jennifer Lawrence’s casting is good; her face has that equal mix of vulnerability and determination that is needed to fill the role, but at the same time she seems older and less affected by the events presented to her Katniss than the Katniss of the novel. She makes the survival part look routine and easy.

In that small failing – failing to show us real emotional turmoil and the actual day to day struggle the Games, and at the same time failing to deviate from the scenes of the book, the movie becomes two hours of fanservice. People who haven’t read the book may well enjoy it as a film, but for me, it was missing either: A) enough drama to make me feel truly concerned for what shadow of her former self would leave the Games alive, or B) enough action to just make me worried she wouldn’t live through it.

If you’re a fan of the books; by all means go and see it on the big screen. Suzanne Collins doesn’t really describe District 12 much, so it’s nice to see it interpreted visually. But if you’re hoping the movie will get you or your kids interested in picking up the book (or save you the trouble of actually reading it) you might come away with the feeling that it’s not as action packed or exciting as you were led to believe. It’s just that the movie only shows you the actions of the novel; not the thoughts and struggles and internal debates that haunt Katniss far more than the other Tributes, and it’s poorer for it.

I guess The Wonder Years has inadvertently prevented anybody ever trying a spoken internal monologue ever again…

Permanent link to this article: http://novelgrind.com/reviews/hunger-games-review/

Mar 26

Your hero is only as good as the villain is bad

Quite by accident, I stumbled upon yet another way to make the antagonist of my novel series even more of a bastard. This is important to me; that he is presented as the best type of villain – the cold and calculating, hands-on, go-getter type of alpha male. He’s self-righteous and completely convinced of his own superiority in all things. It’s so important to me that at this point, he’s the only character with a name and a clear to-do list of villainy.

It actually makes my job a lot easier, during the planning phase, to have the antagonist already conceptualised and ready to go. At any point – at every point – in the narrative, I can ask myself “what is the villain doing?“. He’ll either be reacting to the actions of the hero characters with as much evil as I can muster, or he’ll be pro-actively causing them some kind of grief. The third option is that he’ll be further cementing his grip on the kingdom, but we won’t actually see him do this very often; we’ll mostly see the effects of his machinations in the incidental and support characters we meet in each book.

There are two main points I’d like to make regards your own villain, and this goes for any genre so long as your antagonist is more or less human. First; you want to make sure he isn’t like a child character in a 90′s sitcom: only ever popping into the picture when there’s a punchline to blurt out and the rest of the time conveniently absent. Take the Eragon villain Galbatorix. He might as well have been locked in his tower for all the menace he personally directed at Eragon for 90% of the story. Similarly with Harry Potter’s Voldemort. He did pop up much more frequently, which was great, but he was still mostly just scheming from a distance with a presence that was felt and feared but rarely directly seen. Authors use this method of holding the villain behind a veil because they’re too powerful and will smite the hero before he has a chance to put up a fight. It’s not wrong so much as it is just convenient and a little clichéd. Try not to do it – and especially not for an entire series. Make sure your villain is driving the hero into his quests and sacrifices and burdens. Blame him for everything! That’s what they’re there for.

Second, try your hardest to make your Villain’s actions pull double duty. This can work for your heroes, too (if your hero is clever enough to plan it, only very rarely should any action have a positive unforeseen payoff!) but mostly if your villain isn’t a complete dunce, his plans are going to be impenetrable. The little brainwave I had was to do with a previously planned scene where he wipes out a small village to either catch or kill our heroes. He fails, except to make damned sure our heroes will think twice before asking for help from innocent people again. That was it for that scene, until I later had a dungeon with a scary prisoner inside. Who was he and what had he done? Well, now… what if my villain blamed him for the massacre of the village and made a big public hoo-haa over his trial? The accused is presented as a victory by the villain on behalf of the kingdom (winning him Brownie points with the peons) and is a ready-made morale booster – the villain can allow the prisoner to escape at any time another village needs cleansing! That kind of neat, tied-with-a-bow evilness is my villain in a nutshell.

It will be grand when he gets his comeuppance*!

*comeuppance yet to be planned.

Permanent link to this article: http://novelgrind.com/novel-writing/hero-good-villain-bad/

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