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Deviation Actions
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1. Do your damn research. I can't stress this enough. We live in the freaking Information Age, and the concept of Googling is an alien one to too many people. While I could easily go on a rant about anti-intellectualism, I'll rein it in and say that cliché' is largely anachronistic. People use them because they're familiar, not necessarily what's true. When I started world-building for my Western steampunk/cattlepunk trilogy, one of the characters was the equivalent of a Chinese immigrant worker. So I read everything I could get my hands on about what it was like to be a Chinese immigrant worker. Wikipedia articles, fiction, and non-fiction. I also read authors like Lawrence Yep, whose actual, real ancestors were Chinese immigrants, and that directly fed into his historical fiction. Cliché' fills in what the author fails to describe. Template races like elves and dwarves and dragons are this, big time. If you don't tell us a dragon is a picky eater, capable of teleporting, and spits acid, then we are going to assume your dragon sits on mounds of gold, eats virgins, and breathes fire. However, if you DO tell us all that, you've more or less avoided cliché. Of course, when authors take the time to explain their dwarves live underground, are stoic, and like battle axes, we tend to weep tears of blood. Going back to what mythological creatures really were back in the old days when people seriously thought they were real can reveal surprising depths. Tolkien's elves are anachronistic; their cliché' exists because Tolkien set the precedent. Elves before that were not tall, forest-dwelling immortals who were better than everyone (look up the antics of the Sidhe sometime.) It's just been absorbed to the point of cliché.
2. Combine it with something else. One of the biggest problems with cliché for new writers is that new writers emulate and regurgitate. This is a perfectly natural and acceptable stage in learning to be a writer (or really, any artist.) It's just that people get weirdly protective about their ripoffs sometimes. Aside from that, there's plenty of people willing to jump on a bandwagon. The effluvia Twilight created is still dripping out of the professional publication scene. We've all seen vampires, werewolves, and zombies. If you're using the cliché', we're yawning already. If you're just dying to do it, do a Mad Libs list of things that interest you and combine it with werewolves. Werewolf steampunk. Werewolf spies. Werewolf punk rock stars. All of those sound pretty interesting and non-cliché. The biggest problem I see when it comes to originality is a highly limited resource pool. This person has seen one werewolf movie, the werewolf movie everyone in the world has seen, falls in love with it, imitates it, and gets angry when people accuse them of being unoriginal when they write those exact werewolves. Get me someone who reads Napoleanic wars historical fiction, plays Japanese RPGS where the players overthrow God, and watches spy thriller movies, and I bet that person's werewolves are going to be something worth reading about. But show me someone whose only exposure to werewolves is Twilight, and I will show you someone writing an angry letter to Universal Pictures about how they ripped off Twilight. www.latinoreview.com/news/tayl…
3. Explore what's been done. This kind of ties with Rule#2, but only because it's another facet of limited resource pools. I honestly don't know who would get into their head to write a paranormal romance where a girl falls in love with a shallow hot guy, but I can guarantee you that somewhere out there, right this very minute, someone's writing one, someone's publishing one, and someone's reading one. And odds are, they're not aware of the plethora of that story that's been done to undeath and death again. Meyer famously stated once that she didn't read about vampires, thereby, I'm certain, unleashing a cavalcade of young female writers upon the world that will think that not bothering to research is the only way to free the muse. The other argument I've heard is that people don't want to read the kind of stuff they're writing because they're afraid of absorbing the idea. I call bullshit on that immediately, because ideas are a dime a dozen (see Rule #4.) Again, the big problem I see constantly is that people don't have enough ideas, and stay too far within the realm of what's already been done before. It's kind of a garbage in, garbage out sort of thing; if you're limiting yourself to where you're somehow "allowed" to get ideas from during your creation stage, you're crippling your possibilities. If you've ever read a book where the characters and setting and plot all behaved exactly as you thought it would, with no surprises or reversals along the way, that's an author who didn't bother looking at every other book within his genre and comparing it with his own. Be unique, people. It's the mold-breakers who become timeless. Meyer might have gotten popular, but Jane Austen did it better, and her stuff is still in print. Old women can still tell their kids about Pride and Prejudice. I got a feeling Twilight will go the way of lower-back tattoos and bellbotoom jeans, quietly filed away with all the other teen fads in the closet of regret. While I'm on that subject, remember Goosebumps?
4. Learn the definition of derivative. Whenever I hear people defending crap like Paolini's Inheritance series with the line about "Every story's been told before!" I wanna sock 'em in the mouth. There seems to be a hugely skewed misconception about what is the difference between derivative and borrowing. Derivative is boring and cliché'. End of story. Derivative is not carte' blanche to be unoriginal, and I have no idea who would want to try so hard NOT to be original. Derivative is not an excuse for having hackneyed characters and a predictable plot just because "it worked for Star Wars and Indiana Jones!" First of all, Star Wars and Indiana Jones pulled off whatever they were trying to pull off, broke the mold, and set a precedent, three things that being derivative inherently fails to do. Second, you're trying to steal thunder and it's failing miserably because people know how that story ends. I cannot stress this enough: you are not clever or cool or a fanboy among fanboys just because you're being derivative. You're being an idiot, and this kind of crap puts you firmly within the realm of imitation. Derivative, again, largely happens because people haven't exposed themselves to a large enough resource pool. If Paolini had read anything other than Lord of the Rings and played anything other than Dungeons and Dragons at the age of 15, I will eat my freaking hat. "Borrowing" is not derivative, though it's often mistaken for it. Borrowing usually occurs when writing gives nods or thematic waves to stories or premises similar to it; Fire-Bringer and Watership Down are both animal stories ; they are in no way similar to each other despite both being stories told through animal characters. They touch on similar themes, share elements like prophecy, militarism, and cooperation, and both make use of things like folk hero stories and giving the animals their own culture. If Fire-Bringer's plot had been about a deer who foretells doom and leaves his home with a band of loyal followers to eke out a new existence and fight for females from a band of militaristic deer, Fire-Bringer would have been derivative of Watership Down. It probably would have been popular if it was, because Watership Down was successful.
5. Don't fall into the "speshul" trap. Oh, man, I really need to address this, especially in the face of DA's artists comments. I see so much crap posted about "speshul" stuff, mostly within the realm of characters. "Don't steal my Pokemon trainer! Don't steal my angsty hot teen with superpowers! Don't steal my sparkledog! Don't steal my horse, my Warriors character, my wolf character, my tiger character! THEY'RE SPESHUL!" Honestly, I wonder how many people have bothered to use DA's own search function using a two-word descriptor for their own character just to see what pops up. This rule is double-edged, because it espouses that you both are and are not as original as you think you are. The only danger comes from when you think you are a hundred percent totally unique and sitting on a goldmine character that, if discovered, will rob you of the next Harry Potter phenomenon. (Allow me to break it to you gently that you are not and probably never will be.) You are not "speshul", your story is not "speshul", and if you think you are, you're a dingbat. My case in point would be searching for any animated wolf cartoon on Youtube and trying to summarize five of their plots distinctly. If you give two people, say, a tiger character, and both said people have a large enough resource pool, you will end up with two different, unique tiger characters. One of them might be a ronin samurai with the ability to shapeshift into a tiger. The other might be a tiger who can cover his body in flames and fights hunters to keep his forest safe. But, if those same two people are both in a Warriors funk and that's about the limit of their resource pools, I can guarantee you both are going to end up with similar characters and might accuse each other of stealing. No one person can execute a character or plot quite like another person, and therein lies true uniqueness. But, it's very easy for people to delude themselves with a hall-of-mirrors thing and tell themselves their characters are unique despite being replicas of (take your pick) Buffy/Sephiroth/Cloud/Sonic/Firestar. Characters and stories only become truly unique when one's own personal and unique experience is breathed into them. Someone might steal your character, but they will never be able to write the story you have. (Also, I wonder if these screechy people are at all aware that any amount of notable success with their ideas and stories will unleash unchecked and exploitative imitation anyway.) I also have to point out that resource pools are affected by age. I doubt the average Warriors fan has even heard of or would be capable of enjoying the fantastic Tailchaser's Song, because it's an adult tier book. You absorb different things at age 7 then you do at age 14 or age 20. It's important to give yourself time to hone an idea, because you may not yet have encountered the right idea to make your own reach its fullest potential.
1. Do your damn research. I can't stress this enough. We live in the freaking Information Age, and the concept of Googling is an alien one to too many people. While I could easily go on a rant about anti-intellectualism, I'll rein it in and say that cliché' is largely anachronistic. People use them because they're familiar, not necessarily what's true. When I started world-building for my Western steampunk/cattlepunk trilogy, one of the characters was the equivalent of a Chinese immigrant worker. So I read everything I could get my hands on about what it was like to be a Chinese immigrant worker. Wikipedia articles, fiction, and non-fiction. I also read authors like Lawrence Yep, whose actual, real ancestors were Chinese immigrants, and that directly fed into his historical fiction. Cliché' fills in what the author fails to describe. Template races like elves and dwarves and dragons are this, big time. If you don't tell us a dragon is a picky eater, capable of teleporting, and spits acid, then we are going to assume your dragon sits on mounds of gold, eats virgins, and breathes fire. However, if you DO tell us all that, you've more or less avoided cliché. Of course, when authors take the time to explain their dwarves live underground, are stoic, and like battle axes, we tend to weep tears of blood. Going back to what mythological creatures really were back in the old days when people seriously thought they were real can reveal surprising depths. Tolkien's elves are anachronistic; their cliché' exists because Tolkien set the precedent. Elves before that were not tall, forest-dwelling immortals who were better than everyone (look up the antics of the Sidhe sometime.) It's just been absorbed to the point of cliché.
2. Combine it with something else. One of the biggest problems with cliché for new writers is that new writers emulate and regurgitate. This is a perfectly natural and acceptable stage in learning to be a writer (or really, any artist.) It's just that people get weirdly protective about their ripoffs sometimes. Aside from that, there's plenty of people willing to jump on a bandwagon. The effluvia Twilight created is still dripping out of the professional publication scene. We've all seen vampires, werewolves, and zombies. If you're using the cliché', we're yawning already. If you're just dying to do it, do a Mad Libs list of things that interest you and combine it with werewolves. Werewolf steampunk. Werewolf spies. Werewolf punk rock stars. All of those sound pretty interesting and non-cliché. The biggest problem I see when it comes to originality is a highly limited resource pool. This person has seen one werewolf movie, the werewolf movie everyone in the world has seen, falls in love with it, imitates it, and gets angry when people accuse them of being unoriginal when they write those exact werewolves. Get me someone who reads Napoleanic wars historical fiction, plays Japanese RPGS where the players overthrow God, and watches spy thriller movies, and I bet that person's werewolves are going to be something worth reading about. But show me someone whose only exposure to werewolves is Twilight, and I will show you someone writing an angry letter to Universal Pictures about how they ripped off Twilight. www.latinoreview.com/news/tayl…
3. Explore what's been done. This kind of ties with Rule#2, but only because it's another facet of limited resource pools. I honestly don't know who would get into their head to write a paranormal romance where a girl falls in love with a shallow hot guy, but I can guarantee you that somewhere out there, right this very minute, someone's writing one, someone's publishing one, and someone's reading one. And odds are, they're not aware of the plethora of that story that's been done to undeath and death again. Meyer famously stated once that she didn't read about vampires, thereby, I'm certain, unleashing a cavalcade of young female writers upon the world that will think that not bothering to research is the only way to free the muse. The other argument I've heard is that people don't want to read the kind of stuff they're writing because they're afraid of absorbing the idea. I call bullshit on that immediately, because ideas are a dime a dozen (see Rule #4.) Again, the big problem I see constantly is that people don't have enough ideas, and stay too far within the realm of what's already been done before. It's kind of a garbage in, garbage out sort of thing; if you're limiting yourself to where you're somehow "allowed" to get ideas from during your creation stage, you're crippling your possibilities. If you've ever read a book where the characters and setting and plot all behaved exactly as you thought it would, with no surprises or reversals along the way, that's an author who didn't bother looking at every other book within his genre and comparing it with his own. Be unique, people. It's the mold-breakers who become timeless. Meyer might have gotten popular, but Jane Austen did it better, and her stuff is still in print. Old women can still tell their kids about Pride and Prejudice. I got a feeling Twilight will go the way of lower-back tattoos and bellbotoom jeans, quietly filed away with all the other teen fads in the closet of regret. While I'm on that subject, remember Goosebumps?
4. Learn the definition of derivative. Whenever I hear people defending crap like Paolini's Inheritance series with the line about "Every story's been told before!" I wanna sock 'em in the mouth. There seems to be a hugely skewed misconception about what is the difference between derivative and borrowing. Derivative is boring and cliché'. End of story. Derivative is not carte' blanche to be unoriginal, and I have no idea who would want to try so hard NOT to be original. Derivative is not an excuse for having hackneyed characters and a predictable plot just because "it worked for Star Wars and Indiana Jones!" First of all, Star Wars and Indiana Jones pulled off whatever they were trying to pull off, broke the mold, and set a precedent, three things that being derivative inherently fails to do. Second, you're trying to steal thunder and it's failing miserably because people know how that story ends. I cannot stress this enough: you are not clever or cool or a fanboy among fanboys just because you're being derivative. You're being an idiot, and this kind of crap puts you firmly within the realm of imitation. Derivative, again, largely happens because people haven't exposed themselves to a large enough resource pool. If Paolini had read anything other than Lord of the Rings and played anything other than Dungeons and Dragons at the age of 15, I will eat my freaking hat. "Borrowing" is not derivative, though it's often mistaken for it. Borrowing usually occurs when writing gives nods or thematic waves to stories or premises similar to it; Fire-Bringer and Watership Down are both animal stories ; they are in no way similar to each other despite both being stories told through animal characters. They touch on similar themes, share elements like prophecy, militarism, and cooperation, and both make use of things like folk hero stories and giving the animals their own culture. If Fire-Bringer's plot had been about a deer who foretells doom and leaves his home with a band of loyal followers to eke out a new existence and fight for females from a band of militaristic deer, Fire-Bringer would have been derivative of Watership Down. It probably would have been popular if it was, because Watership Down was successful.
5. Don't fall into the "speshul" trap. Oh, man, I really need to address this, especially in the face of DA's artists comments. I see so much crap posted about "speshul" stuff, mostly within the realm of characters. "Don't steal my Pokemon trainer! Don't steal my angsty hot teen with superpowers! Don't steal my sparkledog! Don't steal my horse, my Warriors character, my wolf character, my tiger character! THEY'RE SPESHUL!" Honestly, I wonder how many people have bothered to use DA's own search function using a two-word descriptor for their own character just to see what pops up. This rule is double-edged, because it espouses that you both are and are not as original as you think you are. The only danger comes from when you think you are a hundred percent totally unique and sitting on a goldmine character that, if discovered, will rob you of the next Harry Potter phenomenon. (Allow me to break it to you gently that you are not and probably never will be.) You are not "speshul", your story is not "speshul", and if you think you are, you're a dingbat. My case in point would be searching for any animated wolf cartoon on Youtube and trying to summarize five of their plots distinctly. If you give two people, say, a tiger character, and both said people have a large enough resource pool, you will end up with two different, unique tiger characters. One of them might be a ronin samurai with the ability to shapeshift into a tiger. The other might be a tiger who can cover his body in flames and fights hunters to keep his forest safe. But, if those same two people are both in a Warriors funk and that's about the limit of their resource pools, I can guarantee you both are going to end up with similar characters and might accuse each other of stealing. No one person can execute a character or plot quite like another person, and therein lies true uniqueness. But, it's very easy for people to delude themselves with a hall-of-mirrors thing and tell themselves their characters are unique despite being replicas of (take your pick) Buffy/Sephiroth/Cloud/Sonic/Firestar. Characters and stories only become truly unique when one's own personal and unique experience is breathed into them. Someone might steal your character, but they will never be able to write the story you have. (Also, I wonder if these screechy people are at all aware that any amount of notable success with their ideas and stories will unleash unchecked and exploitative imitation anyway.) I also have to point out that resource pools are affected by age. I doubt the average Warriors fan has even heard of or would be capable of enjoying the fantastic Tailchaser's Song, because it's an adult tier book. You absorb different things at age 7 then you do at age 14 or age 20. It's important to give yourself time to hone an idea, because you may not yet have encountered the right idea to make your own reach its fullest potential.
Night Pride: How Fandoms Groom Artists for Abuse
Oh boy, was this an interesting little roller coaster. So strap in. I saw the teaser trailer for the fan created Night Pride a while back and I was annoyed. I happen to like My Pride, because for God's sake it's an original work in a sea of corporatism. That the people working on Night Pride disparaged and discussed doxxing the My Pride team is not in the least surprising to me; what else do fandoms do but train one to hate original works? If it's too original, it's not canon, after all. And if it's original work, it's copyright, and that's a dirty word in fanart. Don't say YOUR WORK is copyright, make sure you give credit to Disney! And just recently, the Night Pride got cancelled, and people are making videos about the fallout. Somehow, guys, SOMEHOW, a whole bunch of artists and writers, voice actors and musicians, got roped into doing free labor, without a contract, by someone who wasn't licensed by Disney to adhere to their (admittedly lacking) labor laws. Can you believe
What I Learned From Doing Mark of the Conifer
1. Everything you're afraid of is true. When I really sat down and decided I was going to try publishing, I had a panic attack. A legit, teeth chattering, sick-to-my-stomach panic attack that I had to do breathing exercises to get through. And a lot of cuddling my cat and writing in my journal about what I was so scared of for the next few days. I think the regular stuff was there: what if it doesn't work? What if I fail? What if nobody likes me? But the two biggest things I was afraid of were the work and succeeding. What the HELL was I going to do if I succeeded!?
Turns out absolutely everything I was scared of was right on the money. The a
The Problem of Fan Art: Part 2
"Everything is derivative!"
Some things are more derivative than others. That's what copyright is for.
"Who are YOU to say what is and isn't art?"
I'm a little miffed by this one, because it's like people shooting the messenger. I hate to rain on your parade, but there are legal definitions out there for art. And yes, those partially define art for me personally, but guess what? They also define art for you, too.
Now, I'm not saying the effervescence of humanity as put to canvas is legally defined. There is no way to quantify the blood, sweat, and tears put into a piece. (Which, if you are sweating and bleeding, why you'd want to do it fo
The Problem of Fan Art: Part One
I suppose I've been musing over this for a long time, and since I have released my first big piece of "real" work, I've found myself reading more about the phenomenon of "toxic fandoms."
That's not really what I'm going to talk about, though, even though I think it's a very obvious element to consider. It plays its part in the Problem of Fan Art.
And personal disclaimer: it's not like I've never done fanart myself. I obviously enjoy the aspect of fanart that is creative and expressive, and acts like the proper machine of artistic joie de vivre #notallfanart. But that allows me to move into my introduction: artists do great fanart; fanartist
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This is a very good piece of advice to give to any new or experienced artist. I appreciate it being there, so thank you for writing this.
However, I can't help but notice the fact that you're rather harsh towards young authors who think of their ideas as original even though they're not (as seen in #4 and #5). It seems that you're thinking about it as if people choose to think this way and not just grow into it.
Either way, it's not how this comes to work. People are egocentric in nature (which means that they feel like the world exists around them; "if I saw it, I saw it first, and everybody else who says they saw it are lying, because they can't be right"), and it's a part of normal growing up to learn that world does not, in fact, revolve around you, that you're just a part of it. The process of growing up, if it goes the right way (i.e., a person learns they're not the center of the world), it will go through the growing artist's works, whatever those are.
Either way, I don't believe it's right to verbally punish such people for being what they only see as being at the moment. I know you're angry about this "speshul" thing going on through young artists' minds, but this is how the world works. The article is educational, and I believe using derogatives like "dingbat" towards a person who's just grown very fond of their own creation is unnecessary and, moreover, unfriendly. You're trying to change people's minds for the better on the subject, and you're doing a great deed, but you should let people figure out on their own how to work on what they've just read rather than call them names they might have not deserved. Young minds are sensitive, some of them more than others, so you've got to let them learn on their own when they have the base, the material, which is this article.
Again, the advices are simple and easy to understand, and it's good. But you can't be rude to people just because they're learning what you already know and take for granted. You had to learn from somewhere, too, even if you didn't spend time researching when you were as young an artist as those who read the advices.
However, I can't help but notice the fact that you're rather harsh towards young authors who think of their ideas as original even though they're not (as seen in #4 and #5). It seems that you're thinking about it as if people choose to think this way and not just grow into it.
Either way, it's not how this comes to work. People are egocentric in nature (which means that they feel like the world exists around them; "if I saw it, I saw it first, and everybody else who says they saw it are lying, because they can't be right"), and it's a part of normal growing up to learn that world does not, in fact, revolve around you, that you're just a part of it. The process of growing up, if it goes the right way (i.e., a person learns they're not the center of the world), it will go through the growing artist's works, whatever those are.
Either way, I don't believe it's right to verbally punish such people for being what they only see as being at the moment. I know you're angry about this "speshul" thing going on through young artists' minds, but this is how the world works. The article is educational, and I believe using derogatives like "dingbat" towards a person who's just grown very fond of their own creation is unnecessary and, moreover, unfriendly. You're trying to change people's minds for the better on the subject, and you're doing a great deed, but you should let people figure out on their own how to work on what they've just read rather than call them names they might have not deserved. Young minds are sensitive, some of them more than others, so you've got to let them learn on their own when they have the base, the material, which is this article.
Again, the advices are simple and easy to understand, and it's good. But you can't be rude to people just because they're learning what you already know and take for granted. You had to learn from somewhere, too, even if you didn't spend time researching when you were as young an artist as those who read the advices.