Move along people, nothing to see here! 09/07/2011
In the interest of streamliningness and making up words, I've moved the blog over to DetectiveClarke.com -- it's all the same goodness, with exponentially more black and green! 1 Comment I don’t believe in writer’s block. 09/03/2011
NOTE: The Brian P. Blog has moved over to detectiveclarke.com, click this sentence to check it out!
Don’t get me wrong – there are times when I just don’t know what to write, or where to go, or any of a myriad of other problems that keep blank pages sitting where literary genius should rightfully be, but it’s not because of some mysterious condition that removes the inspiration and talent from an otherwise talented artist. What has been commonly termed “writer’s block” is really just a catch-all term for whatever concoction of fatigue, laziness, writing yourself into a corner, wanting to do something else, etc. is jamming your head at the moment. Even though I disavow its existence, there are few feelings worse than the idea that you’re staring at a piece of work with a gaping hole in it, and there’s just nothing you can do about it. Plowing through this condition and churning out quality work when you feel like you can’t or you just don’t want to is what separates the contenders from the pretenders as far as top level writing goes, so how do you do it? Hell if I know. NOTE: The Brian P. Blog has moved over to detectiveclarke.com, click this sentence to check it out! I recently rewatched Sherlock, the BBC reimagining of the classic characters made famous by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. If you haven't caught the show, stop reading this drivel and do it right now. It was only on here in the U.S. on PBS, but it is a bit more accessible now via the magic of Netflix instant streaming. The show is crisply written and very stylish, with the actors delivering top notch performances. All in all, the series that asks what it would be like if Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were around in early 21st Century London was more enjoyable than Guy Ritchie's interpretation featuring Robert Downey Jr. as the eponymous detective. I've recommended Sherlock to a few people, and always preface my recommendation with the caveat that the show will frustrate them by leaving the viewer wanting more. See, Sherlock's first series consisted of three episodes, ninety minutes each. By the time you finish watching them, you feel like you've just started to get to know the characters, what makes them tick, all the little things that make a show more than a fun way to spend an hour or so. Like many things tend to do, it made me think about how I write. Is it good to hold back, to leave them wanting more? Of course it is, when you're selling a book for anywhere from 99 cents to three bucks, you want to drum up repeat business, and lots of it. So, like most things in writing, it's imperative to create a delicate balance: satisfy the customer and leave them wanting more at the same time. This is something the writers at Sherlock did exceptionally well. The three episodes build, starting with the core characters and unfolding a well thought out universe of goodies, baddies, and in-betweenies. It became apparent in the first episode that the first episode of the series. Though each episode has a villain, there is what has become known as a "big bad," the biggest villain that entire seasons/series are built on, if not the entire television show -- think Monk, The Mentalist, The Fugitive, and others. If you're even casually familiar with Holmes lore, you're probably aware of who this is. The end of series one (the term 'series' has the same connotation in the U.K. as 'season' has in the States) saw Holmes and his nemesis meet, drumming up suspense for season two. This is the advantage of free. I couldn't end a book, even a book in a series, on a cliffhanger. I firmly believe that if someone is paying good money for something, they deserve a conclusion, even if the story goes on. Now, that's not to say you can't do something that bridges on, I just wouldn't want to end in the typical television "To Be Continued..." fashion. To me, The Empire Strikes Back was a pretty good version of this. You got an ending, and it wasn't a pleasant one. If it would have ended with "Luke, I am..." TO BE CONTINUED, people would have been livid. And yes, Star Wars fans, I am aware that the phrase in the film is different, but the more popular, incorrect one is better for this comparison. If I can't do a pure cliffhanger, what can I do? It's easy; make the final parts of the book the first glimpses of the new world you've created in the existing book. Story is about change. If your characters are all acting and thinking like they were at the start, they're in the same station in life, and nothing has really happened, you're dead in the water already. Your ending is important -- and by ending, I don't mean the reveal and capture/killing of the perpetrator, the couple finally getting together, the planet being saved, or anything like that. The dénouement is your opportunity to set up whatever cliffhanger might be coming, or to give just enough of a glimpse into the world this work has created to entice readers into returning. Of course, if the book itself is good enough, there's a decent chance they're coming back anyway. NOTE: The Brian P. Blog has moved over to detectiveclarke.com, click this sentence to check it out! "The 0-2 pitch, swing and a miss! Struck 'em out!" Those words will reveberate in my head for as long as I live. I'm a big baseball and football fan. I grew up in the Philadelphia area. These two facts, when combined, have provided a cocktail of misery more often than not. Indeed, these are the halcion days of the Philadelphia sports fan, but we've had to wade through a lot of crud infested waters to get there - it's a big reason why we've earned the reputation of being rude, crude, vile, and a lot of other nasty things. It took me twenty-five years to see a championship anywhere across all four major American sports. The 76ers won the NBA title a few months before I was born and a Philadelphia team didn't take one home again until October 29, 2008. I remember watching the little television in the break room where I worked, one still hooked up with rabbit ears, and watching a feed of FOX no bigger than 12 or 15 inches, smaller than my computer screen, dancing in and out. The sheer euphoria I felt when the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series that night was something to remember. I had a smile plastered on my face the whole week. I still get one when I think back. It's feelings like this -- good and bad -- and their bigger, more tangible real life counterparts that I attempt to bring forth in my writing. How does one bottle an emotion, strip it down into words and phrases and place it in concentrated form onto a page? It's something I've struggled with - my strengths are snappy dialogue, turning a phrase, injecting humor into humorless situations, stuff like that. I have to fight a constant battle to retain a sense of humanity in my writing. But at least I know my weaknesses, and at least I have that 0-2 pitch that was swung at and missed. When Good Characters Go Bad 08/06/2011
I did a bad thing. I didn't realize I'd done this bad thing, but ignorance is no defense. I'm Detective Clarke was not a story I was sitting on for a long time, it was closer to a burst of inspiration. I was stuck in a dead end job working the graveyard shift and wondering how I was going to make things better. I thought about life and our expectations for it. More importantly, I thought of the mundane trap most of us are stuck in and how I was going to break out of it. The answer was simple: the talking cure. The talking cure is the idea that by talking your way through your problems, you work out methods to fix them -- and it worked. My fix was I'm Detective Clarke: the piece of fiction that was going to turn me from a hobbyist writer to a Kindle/Nook superstar (still waiting on that, but that's a post for another time). By writing my coming of age detective story, I was going to step out of the muck and into my dreams by writing about someone who does the same. At the very least I could live vicariously through my characters which, while not the healthiest thing in the world, can be quite fun in small bursts. On the way, I did a bad thing. The one character in I'm Detective Clarke that existed before I formulated the novel was Jerry Clarke who appeared (minus the 'e' in his last name) in my first screenplay back in 1999. Since that early version of the character Jerry has, like a lot of us, gotten older and had a kid: Robert Declan Clarke, R.D. for short, our protagonist about to come of age. He is the bad thing I did. Generally speaking, your main character should be likeable, especially in a detective book told in the first person. If I've done my job right, we want R.D. to crack the case, we want R.D. to escape whatever dangers he gets himself into, and we want R.D. to get the girl. For us to do this, we have to like R.D. As I was writing, it dawned on me that R.D. was kind of unlikeable. He lied, he played on the emotions of others, he used people -- I won't spoil it but he makes one decision to stake out a locale that should have been sacred ground -- he does a lot of bad things throughout I'm Detective Clarke. As I edited, I warmed up on R.D. a bit. Even when he did something of questionable moral character, he did it with noble intentions -- well, most of the time. He was flawed, but good at the core. More importantly, I learned that this is exactly where I wanted my protagonist to be. I love Superman, but I understand why Batman has performed better at the movies -- Batman is a character more in tune with modern sentiments. Superman is a paragon, he does what's right, he always wins, and he never takes a misstep. Even if that's not how Superman is written now, that's my perception of him, and I'm not alone. Batman is rough around the edges, he's vulnerable, you need to keep watching not just because Batman's foe is working against him, but because he may wind up working against himself. It's conflict, and conflict is the engine that makes fiction go. Writers, don't be afraid to make your main character a little bit of a jerk. After all, (s)he's only human. Unless they're from Krypton. That's a whole other ball of wax. Welcome to my Blog! 08/04/2011
We're just getting started here, but feel free to look around. Check out the links to Detective Clarke and Project Humanoid at the top of the page to take a look at my active projects, or click the Contact tab to join me on a litany of social networks. | AuthorBrian is an avid writer, an avid reader, and an avid user of the word 'avid.' Liars. Thieves. Murderers.
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