Testing the Bechdel Waters

So, I recently heard about the Bechdel Test for Women in Movies, which... really makes me view my writing in a different light. The test is a fairly simple one: In Movie X, are there two female characters (with names)? Do the two women talk to each other? Do they talk to each other about something other than a man (not necessarily romantically, but just about a man, be it their father, their boss, their boyfriend, or their son)? That's it. And yet barely any of my stories pass because I suffer under this delusion that women are hard to write.

I need to get past this. I am a woman, I am a feminist, and I am a writer. I should be able to write a female character, and I should be able to write more than one female character in the same story. My excuse used to be that I didn't have any female friends, I always connected better with men, and therefore it was difficult for me to write girls like how they really were. Most of the time, when an idea for a female character popped into my brain, it would be some trope I picked up from TV or a movie or a book, and I would say, "Well, I guess I'll just write some guys. I know how they really are."

Except for the part where that's all a lie now. I'm friends with more women than men now, and I still write primarily male characters. The women and men I'm friends with are by no means typical, and none of the male characters I write are not like any of my friends. So, my mission is to write more females. My next piece of fiction needs to pass the Bechdel Test, because the last time I wrote a story with a female main character in it, the main character was originally a male and the genders were switched as something of a writing experiment.

In fact, right now, I'm rewriting one of my NaNoWriMos from years past, and I think I'm going to attempt to expand the roles of my female characters, and swap a couple of the men out for girls. The main character is still going to be male because the character is so built up in my mind that I couldn't change him to female any more than I could change his hair or eye color or nationality. That bitch is stuck. Wish me luck!

Starting fresh, again and again

I started this thing way back in June, but then I moved, and I no longer had internet. After several long months of an internetless existence, subsisting on the internet and apps available on my Droid, the boyfriend and I finally splurged and purchased internet. It is a glorious thing indeed.

So, what did I do during that time of no distractions? I worked. I did the retail drudgery for a few months, then I hopped jobs to a bank and I've been loving it. This, however, leaves no time for writing at work. When I worked at Safeway, it was one of my bad habits. I would hide in my little booth, blasting Elvis Costello and William Control and scribble ideas on the backs of scratch paper and superfluous reports. Many great ideas and pieces came out of that! But I can no longer get away with this, not on the teller line. Oh well, such is life, I wasn't really doing it much when I was cashiering either.

I did, however, do NaNoWriMo again, with a whole new challenge! I managed to spit out my first novel in around 12 days, realizing about halfway through that said novel is not really novel material. It's really more of a short story, or a long short story, kind of idea. Oh well, at least I learned that before pouring months of my life into it. Then I did a second novel! This one I loved. I have to do all kinds of research on the Russian mafia before I go forward with it, or if I go forward with it, but I loved the story, and I loved my characters and I was just so very happy with it. I felt the same way about my Camp NaNoWriMo story, so yay! Good things are coming out of NaNo!

Oh, but! Back in August, while I was in the process of moving and crashing at my mother's place for a couple weeks, the boyfriend encouraged me to finally submit one of my stories. I wouldn't feel like a real writer until I got my first official rejection, and I needed to just suck it up and start putting some things out in the universe. I chose a story I wrote for a creative writing class a couple years back, polished it up a little more, then shot it off to a magazine with both a physical and web version. The web version doesn't pay anything, the physical version pays $5. I said I'd be game for either, since I would just be happy to see my work put in something. Well, they accepted it for the web version! Come March, I will finally have something published online! Hell to the yes. Technically this means I have a 100% success rate, but I'm pretty sure I should have a success rate of, like, 10% because I should be submitting my stories much more frequently. Whatever, Buzzkill Alex, don't spoil this special moment for me.

SO, there, I am going to try and get back to this because my registration for this school semester got messed up and I should take this opportunity to work like a motherfucker and write. Maybe I will actually finish a NaNo novel OUTSIDE of November (or the month that was set aside for writing a novel). Maybe I'll win a million dollars. Anything could happen.

Dream Talk

So, I keep getting this inspiration from dreams. Which, yeah, I know, isn't that rare. Writers get inspiration from dreams all the time! It just doesn't happen to me too often, because either a) I don't remember my dreams, b) my dreams are stressful and I don't want to remember my dreams, or c) they're really damn boring.

But there's one dream I've had that's popped up about three times that's none of the above. Well, not really one dream, but it's from the same world, I guess? At any rate, when I wake up, my first thought is, "Oh man, that dream was awesome! I need to write it down so I can work it into something and write that award-winning novel right now." So I grab a pen or pencil and the notebook that I always keep by the side of my bed (or sometimes just another book, I've written ideas on lots of things I really shouldn't be writing on) and start writing and writing... until I realize that I don't know how to use this idea. You would think that after three dreams with this idea, I would start to get a handle on what's causing all the action I see in my dream, but nope, not a clue.

It doesn't help that the idea I have bears a slight resemblance to a kind of iconic work. The first dream I had while I was reading this book, so I blamed it on that, but I wasn't even a huge fan of this book. I don't know why I would still be even thinking about it around seven or eight months later and it would have any kind of effect on my dreams. So... I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do with this. I'll have to think more.

In other news, Camp NaNoWriMo. I want to do it, but I don't know if it's a good idea. I thought there was going to be a year-round aspect to it, not two summer sessions (though it does make sense to limit it to certain  months so everyone can get all jazzed up about it, not let it fall apart like all those NaNo-inspired communities and sites for year-round novel-writing, or editing or finishing your NaNo) and July and August are going to be busy for me. In July, I'm leaving town for ten days, and then shortly thereafter I'm moving, so August is going to be filled up with moving, finding jobs (if I haven't found one already), and starting school, and I won't have my NaNo buddies around. It just wouldn't be smart.

But, then again, isn't that what NaNo is kind of all about? There is no perfect time to write a novel, so it's a way to force us to accept our fate of being busier than hell and eke out some time to write. Plus, I've always been able to excel at the 50k thing when there's a clock ticking, so I might be able to get to 50k before I even leave for Vegas in July, or between moving and starting school in August.

Maybe.

I still need to figure out what I'm doing. Aaaagh!

Writing For Shits and Giggles. Minus the Giggles.

How does one write comedy? It's something I've wondered for a while now. I've read some amazing books that made me almost pee myself in laughter (Catch-22, John Dies At the End, or, going back to my younger years, the Wayside School books), and almost inevitably when I'm finished I think, "Oh, man, I could write something like that! Everybody says I'm funny, how hard could it be?" The answer, you naive little aspiring writer in my mirror? Pretty goddamn hard.

It seems kind of unfair at first. Look at what's on TV or at the movie theater. Comedy. There's comedy everywhere. Situational comedies, physical comedies, romantic comedies, stoner comedies, etc., etc., there's a million different subgenres when it comes to comedy on the big or little screen because everyone who sits down at the end of the day to watch TV wants to laugh, and it's easy to make people laugh when they can see what you mean. Comedic timing and delivery goes a long way in movies, even if there's a mediocre plot or script. How do you convey comedic timing? I might have Zach Galifianakis and Tina Fey in mind when I'm writing this hilarious duo in my story, but the reader probably won't. How do you describe the specifics of an awkward conversation without bogging the conversation down in details? How do you show the reader that, without missing a beat (and without saying, "without missing a beat"), Character X let loose a quip that should leave you crying with laughter? And how do you find a voice that's funny to more than a handful of people? Hell, what DO most people find funny, aside from pratfalls and parodies? Plus, there's the whole communal aspect of TVs and movies that lets you share the fun and make additional jokes with your friends and blah blah blah, basically it's hard out here for one who deals exclusively in text.

I know, I know, I shouldn't worry about what the audience is going to think. That's the stumbling block for about 95% of aspiring authors (not a real statistic). If I'm funny, then that will come through and reach someone, but that's a problem. I know I'm funny, because I make people laugh all the time. I know I'm funny because everyone says so. Well, all my friends do. And when I word it like that, it sounds about the same as me saying my mother thinks I'm beautiful or my dog thinks I'm really good at scratching his butt. No, no, I'm pretty sure I'm actually fairly amusing, but the kind that works best when I'm playing off other people who are also amusing (and, possibly, more so than me, and allow me to bask in their reflected glory). My biggest problem comes from making jokes and creating humor from nothing. Not to mention the fact that it's pretty damn near impossible to objectively judge your own writing. You see your writing all the time, you read it a million times before letting other people look it over, and you know what it says. Part of humor is not expecting the joke at the end, so when you've gone through your fourth edit and you're pretty sure the writing itself is nearly polished, it's going to be hard to look at these jokes or humorous situations that you've created and see them as funny.

Nnnnngh. It's so much easier to write tragedy. There's a fairly general consensus on what's tragic. Loss is pretty much universally sad, so throw that in your novel and you've got the pain part covered. But comedy? Ugh.

Which is why I've decided to attempt a comedy for Camp NaNoWriMo. Because personal growth waits on no man!