Sure, yeah! I’ll give you some of the top things I’ve learned in studying creative writing/life in general.
ONE: Never underestimate the reader. A lot of times people think that they have to describe every single detail so that the audience will know what they mean, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes simply saying “she gave him a curious look” says more than “her brows furrowed in curiosity, wondering what he meant”. You have to trust the reader to make that connection on their own while still keeping the writing smooth and limited. The reader will catch on to your hints. Don’t make it too obvious.
TWO: Master the art of flash fiction. The more flash fiction you write, the better your longer writing will become. Flash fiction is a story of 1000 words or less that really strips down to the wire and creates intrigue without giving too much away, very much like a short film. I had a whole class on flash fiction and my writing INSTANTLY improved afterward, especially because I am someone who thrives on descriptive language and often over-complicates things in my work.
THREE: Write 1,000 words or more every day. Stephen King said this in his book about what makes a good writer, and I believe it. I’ve been keeping up with this for the past year and it’s worked out wonderfully for me. I can feel my writing truly improving, and it gets you in the habit of pushing past writer’s block. You don’t have to publish what you write anywhere. Just write something.
FOUR: Read books. Like a sword needs a whetstone, a writer needs reading. Sharpen your skills in someone else’s forgery. Get inspired. Compliment other writers and appreciate when they compliment you back.
FIVE: Never ever ever ever ever ever forget the fans. They are the reason you do what you do. Don’t disrespect them. Want to break their hearts with plot? Go ahead! Want to make your story stick with them in good and bad ways? By all means! You are the writer and have full creative license, but understand that your fans are your sponsors and your network, the people holding you up. Don’t walk on them.
SIX: Learn how to take criticism, even the bad stuff. Writing will always leave you vulnerable to haters. Learn to ignore them and you’re unstoppable (but listen to those who politely present genuine complaints, however. Address them kindly, you might find they’re right!)
SEVEN: Know what needs your full attention and what doesn’t. As a future novelist I have to wonder what my focus is truly on–writing fanfiction while I’m working on my degrees, or saving all that creative juice for my novel? Of course, that’s not to say that I’m lazy over my fanfiction, but I don’t slave over it like I would over actual books. Fanfiction is free. It’s not my dream to write fanfic forever and I’m not getting paid, nor will it get me famous. Just be aware of your priorities. Don’t wear yourself out before your real journey begins!
EIGHT: Put your work out there. Poetry, fanfiction, original work, something. Get feedback. Learn how to interact with fans and take suggestions/criticism from them. Don’t be shy.
NINE: Get an ego (in a good way!). It takes serious guts to put your writing out there. It’s a part of you that you’re exposing to the world; of course you’ll get offended when someone tears it down, and love it when others raise it up. I’m convinced that every writer has to be a bit self-absorbed to make it, because confidence is truly the key to getting out of the gate.
TEN: Travel somewhere alone. You may think that going to Mexico, San Francisco and Italy for two weeks as a 20 y/o single white girl all by myself was a bad choice, but it was FUN and I made so many memories. You meet new people and learn to socialize, learn to break out of your comfort zone. You hear stories that inspire you from other people. You make new friends and have no limits on what you can do–it’s incredibly liberating. I can’t tell you how it helped me as a writer and a person to be able to stand in the Sistine Chapel around a bunch of strangers, looking up at Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and thinking to myself, “wow. This is art, this is history, this is the impact of what we create as people over hundreds of years. And I’m contributing.” I sat in that chapel for three hours watching people go by, surrounded by all this beautiful art and raw purity of the human existence and I was on no one else’s time. I spent days just walking around Rome and learning about humanity because I wanted to. It was powerful. Let humanity inspire you.
My thesis this semester is to take on a chunk of the Ars Goetia demons. I wanted to portray Baal in a distinctly less goaty fashion, and combine the bull and cat attributes he sometimes takes on. And, fun-sized Raum for a friend.
They’re all phenomenal. If you have five minutes, please watch each of them. Warning: some hit HARD.
Mary Blair (1911-1978)
Worked for Ub Iwerks, MGM, and eventually Disney. Known for creating incredibly vibrant watercolors, which clashed with the studio aesthetic at the time. Disney eventually let her loose, and her aesthetic can be strongly seen in Cinderella, Peter Pan, and especially Alice in Wonderland.
Evelyn Lambart (1914-1999)
Hearing-impaired Canadian animator who worked with Norman McLaren on several pieces that the Canadian government would later declare masterworks. She directed her own films, making her one of the first women in animation to take the director’s chair. She was known for scratching up film stock to create “jazz” like patterns, the sort of thing you’d later see in Fantasia,Donald in Mathmagic Land, and the like.
Lotte Reininger (1899-1981)
German director who created the technique of silhouette animation, preceding Disney by 10 years. Started out making titles for movies and moved on to make her own animated feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, in 1926!As for the rest of her career, well - watch the short.
Claire Parker (1906-1981)
Created the “pinscreen” animation technique, where 240,000 tiny metal rods were manually manipulated in and out of a board in order to create an animation – think tweaking pixels by hand. She and she alone owned the patent on it.
Alison de Vere (1927-2001)
One of the first women to work in British animation, and was design director for The Yellow Submarine. She went on to create many animated shorts at a commercial studio, winning prizes for virtually almost every single one of them. She is often credited as Britain’s first female animation auteur.
Anonymous: Thanks for all of the advice thus far! What does a script writer/ screenwriter's portfolio look like? Can you give a a few tips and examples? I have a few spec scripts written, but I am not sure how to organize it online or in print.
Sorry it’s taken me so long to answer this question, anon.
This is a tough one because writers don’t really have portfolios. Writers have samples/specs and a “body of work”. It’s easy to look at an artists’ drawing and go, “Hmm. I like that.” With a writer, you have to invest time – something busy folks who hire people don’t have a lot of.
Spec scripts are good to have. You can write an original idea (probably the best course of action) or write an episode of an existing show (something that’s currently on the air and hopefully new, but will run for a few years). I wrote a Modern Family and a Regular Show spec before getting hired on Harvey Beaks. You want to make sure these scripts are formatted properly, so look up and read a bunch of scripts to make sure yours looks “official”.
This is a great resource for finding scripts and so is this.
The next thing you can do is make your writing easily available. We’ve already established people don’t have a lot of time to read your script, so don’t make it difficult for them to find it. Put it online! Post a link or an excerpt on Tumblr. Have it available for when someone finally asks to read a sample from you. But how do you get someone to ask you for a writing sample?
Networking! Go out and meet people. Email people you don’t know, but whom you admire. Meet as many people doing what you want to do and get their advice. Don’t force your samples on them (again, they may not have time), but let them know that you exist. The more people who know you, the higher probability of you getting hired. Numbers.
Lastly, keep writing. You just finished writing a spec or sample? Congrats! Get started on another.
Brad Bird told The McKinsey Quarterly in 2008, “The Incredibles was everything that computer-generated animation had trouble doing. It had human characters. It had hair. It had fire. It had a massive number of sets. The technical team took one look and thought, ‘This will take ten years and cost $500 million. How are we possibly going to do this?’
“So I said, ‘Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door’. A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well.
“We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here (at Pixar). For less money per minute than was spent on the previous film, Finding Nemo, we did a movie that had three times the number of sets and had everything that was hard to do. All this because the heads of Pixar gave us leave to try crazy ideas. [x]
Hey there! I’m a recently graduated illustration student, now working as a freelance illustrator. When I was graduating, I was a bit unsure of what life would be like after school, and while my professors attempted to prepare us for the inevitable, I feel like you can’t really know what it’ll be like unless you’ve had to go through it yourself! They can only tell me so many times that I need “a presentable website, business cards, blah blah blah”, and I’ll shrug it off and go “yeah yeah, I’ll do that eventually”.
Seriously. Listen to them. Because they’re not wrong.
I don’t know if I was just deluding myself (probably), but as other illustrators will tell you, working in this field takes an incredible amount of dedication, and they’re not kidding. As a newborn freelance illustrator, being kicked out of the crib that is college, you will be scared shitless. It’s almost guaranteed! And that’s okay! And if you’re not? Then hey dude congrats, you should be writing this; not me.
Anyways! I wanted to write this to go through my personal experience with being shoved into the wonderful world of freelance illustration. By no means is this a definitive guide of what to do!!! So of course, experiences may vary! But I figured, why not share some of the things I’ve picked up on? I wouldn’t be surprised if your professor has already told you this stuff (hopefully they have), but in case they haven’t, hopefully this’ll help a bit!
So my dad is in the kitchen business, my uncle is a banker, my grandfather was in the kitchen business, my other uncle is a plumber and does a lot of work for hotels, and his brother-in-law actually owns hotels.
Okay, so at different points and for different reasons, they’ve all had interactions with Donald Trump. And here’s something they all agree on: he will screw you over if he can. And you better believe he can with all the money he has. My dad and my grandpa almost did work for him, but after talking with other people who had worked for him in the past, they found out that he cheats his workers - ESPECIALLY contractors. He’ll pay them a fraction of what he promises and then, if they try to take him to court over it, he hires the best lawyers money can buy and then countersues!
Do not vote for this man. He is a professional liar, backstabber and a crook in all but name. He’s the last thing we need in any office, especially the Oval Office.
Hi, I'm Tim Lai! I'm a cartoonist living in Ontario, Canada. I like drawing cute and colourful things. This blog is a hub where you can find all of my Tumblr, DeviantArt, Flickr, Blogspot, and other posts in one place.
About My Work
I write and draw Lemon Inc., a comic about a seven-year-old who wants to be a business tycoon when he grows up. Until then, he runs a lemonade stand. You can read it at www.lemon-inc.com.
I have done some professional web and graphic design work, including designing the website for the webcomic, Just Joel. I'm also a member of the webcomic collective, Ink Bomb Comics.
September 13, 2015 19:23
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sun-of-ra: hiya! was just wondering if you had any general writing and/or life tips for prospective writers?