Writing Gooder

A couple weeks ago, a YWSer asked me an interesting question: are character names copyrighted? He had received what appeared to be two different answers on the question, but which I told him was really the same answer told two different ways.

The short of it is, no, character names are not copyrighted. You cannot copyright short phrases or names, and that of course extends to the names of characters. So you could use characters named Edward Cullen, Indiana Jones, or Luke Skywalker in a story about how Luke and Indy relentlessly poke fun at Edward.

However, the characters themselves can be copyrighted. So while the name of the character isn’t copyrighted, the character itself could be. That means that while I can use the name Luke Skywalker, I can’t really write about Luke Skywalker (or at least, I can’t profit from doing so).

As you can imagine, there are a lot of fine lines here. Firstly, not every character can be copyrighted; the character either needs to be described very specifically or one of the central characters. Secondly, what if I wrote a story set in 2560 AD about a war between Mars and Earth and one of the starfighter pilots is named Luke Skywalker? The connection between my character and George Lucas’ character is pretty obvious, but then again there are significant differences between the two. Still, I’d probably be okay doing that, unless George Lucas has trademarked the name.
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A few years ago, I wrote a short blog post about how cursive writing is falling by the way-side (in the USA at least).  But forget about that; what if an entire generation was growing up forgetting how to write, period?

Things aren’t that bad, but the Associated Foreign Press has a news story about how teenagers and 20-somethings in China are forgetting many of the thousands of characters in their language.  Overblown?  Yes.  Distressing? Not so much.  Learning Chinese character writing is one of the hardest writing skills to learn in the world, and until very recently, the domain of the elite.  Excerpt follows after the break.

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For decades now, we’ve all been accustomed to the almost obligatory mini book catalog at the end of many a novel; the ones that say “You may also like…” or “Upcoming books from Penguin…” or “Other books by this author”.  But, as advertising goes, it’s pretty invisible.  That may change.

This past Thursday, the Wall Street Jounral’s Ron Adner and William Vincent wrote:

With e-reader prices dropping like a stone and major tech players jumping into the book retail business, what room is left for publishers’ profits? The surprising answer: ads. They’re coming soon to a book near you.

Source: WSJ, Get ready for ads in books

Paul Carr of TechCrunch summarizes their argument nicely: (more…)

For sale: Baby shoes; never used.

- Ernest Hemingway

Legend has it that Hemingway wrote the above when his colleagues bet him he couldn’t write a story in just six words.  After winning the bet, Hemingway called it his best work.

Whether that’s just an urban legend or has a basis in fact, it’s useful to analyze why Hemingway would call it his best work.  In fact, I could think of three reasons.

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There’s a good article posted on Wired discussing how usage of the Internet has rewired our brains.  Namely, while Internet usage does lead to increased visual-spatial ability, it also leads to shallower learning.  After all, just think how many times you’ve only skimmed an article on the Internet rather than read it as thoroughly as you would if it were on paper.  Why, I bet you’re skimming this now!

So that’s all well and good, but how does it apply to you?  Well, the article got me thinking how you could take advantage of human psychology in your writing. (more…)

There are a lot of writing sites that actively enforce proper capitalization as well as good style rules when it comes to titles.  In large part, such rules are enforced due to aesthetics.  Having a forum full of properly formatted titles is a lot like having a clean, organized room.  Yet, I’ve always thought it’s a bit misguided.

For one, an author may have a perfectly good reason for not following the proper style rules.   The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner is one such example.  There, the author based the title of the book off the name of a daycare, which misspelled ‘happyness’ in its name, that he used to leave his son at during the day.

But for another, the title is a good indicator of how an author feels about his own work.  Whenever I see a literary work on the Young Writers Society with a shoddy title, I know the author does not care about the work he posted.  Plus, if you can’t bother to write a proper title – something that only takes a minute – then what does that say about the likely quality of the work?

And that is why the title is so important: it’s the first indicator to the reader of how the author feels about his work and about the quality of the work.  That indicator is extremely important as it lets the reader know whether or not to spend the time necessary to read and review the work in question (which is why YWS doesn’t actively enforce rules concerning titles of works).  So if you’re not spending time on your title, you may want to rethink your priorities.

Not listing these in any particular order; these are just some very good desktop backgrounds that you may enjoy as a reader/writer.

To see the full-size image, simply click on it.

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I’m not exactly sure when the whole grammatical convention of writing ‘he/she’ came into being when the gender was unclear, but I imagine it’s a pretty recent development.  For centuries (millenia?), you always wrote ‘he’ if the gender was not known.  But of course, doing that is no longer tenable.

So instead at some point, someone decided that from now on, we must write ‘he/she’ or ‘his/her’.  This idiosyncratic style of writing quickly caught on and became a grammatical convention.  But, it’s time to stop this.

In writing, we should strive to remove as many unnecessary words as possible (and not a word more).  This is especially true in academic writing (even though a great many academics have missed the memo…), but it’s also true in creative writing.  Using five words when just one word will do is nowadays regarded as absurd.

And this is seen very clearly with cases of ‘he/she’.  So instead of using two words when just one will do, just go with your gender.  If you’re a guy, use ‘he’.  If you’re a lady, use ‘she’.  Or, do the opposite.  It doesn’t matter which gender you go with as long as you’re consistent throughout the piece you’re writing.

But lets stop the he/she stuff.  It’s unnecessary, breaks the flow of whatever you’re writing, and is becoming absurd.

We’ve all been through it: you come up with an idea that you’re really excited about and it’s subsequently all you can think about.  At first, you have a ton of energy and you may spend ample time per day on your idea.  But, the creative excitement wanes as you begin to encounter the drudgery of executing your idea.  If it’s a novel, that could mean taking hours to put down on paper what you already know in your head.  Or it could mean editing and revising your novel.  If it’s a project, then it could mean having to sticking to deadlines and filling in mundane details.  Either way, you’re filling in odds and ends for which the creativity aspect is either nil or non-existent.  Eventually, you abandon the idea and move on to something else that you’re really excited about.

This stage in the idea development process is known as the creativity plateau.  It starts off with generating an idea, being really excited about the idea, then having to do the mundane stuff.  Once we enter that later plateau for which creativity isn’t always necessary, we get bored and move on to our next great idea.  As a result, you may have scores of unfinished ideas. (more…)

Charles Stross, the critically acclaimed science-fiction author of such books as Singularity Sky (great series) and Halting State, announced today in his blog that he will no longer be writing science-fiction.

We’ve been taking a hard look at the market realities; things have been particularly grim in SF/F publishing ever since November 2008, and it has become clear that in light of a downward spiral of diminishing sales things can’t go on as before. The poor market conditions (Tim Holman of Little, Brown says the British publishing industry as a whole shipped 1% fewer books in 2009) are resulting in downward pressure on new book advances: as an agent of my acquaintance put it, with respect to advances, “five grand is the new twenty grand”.

Obviously, science-fiction publishing isn’t what it used to be.  Thirty years ago, if you put a rocket on the cover, then you were guaranteed an audience of tens of thousands as geeks rushed to buy it.  These days, science-fiction’s biggest competitor isn’t other books or even movies: it’s video games.  That leads to some unfortunate market realities.  So as they say, adapt or die.  It looks like Stross has chosen the former:

Late last year my agent and I conducted an exhaustive review of my skill-set and background, to the extent of commissioning a focus group to look into my work to date and suggest new directions.

Stross then goes on to describe his new novel:

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