Creative Frustrations

[frent]

I commissioned an artist on the Web to sketch and color some of the characters I've come up with, after all these years. Many of you know I have almost nothing to show for my work, save a rough character sheet, a few e-mails, and various scribblings. That content, or lack of it, isn't the issue here. I was lying awake in bed one night recently and

Comments

[tenketsu]

Well, there are two things I feel the need to impart. First, if you want to be a writer, you need to read the Great Books. I don't know how much of that you've done. But anyway, writers like Dostoevsky, Sartre, and Hemingway... Ones that really get down to it and bare the human soul, warts and all. They'll teach you how to develop characters that live and breathe. And, for my money, there's no better teacher on how to explore an /idea/ than sci-fi short stories. At my library we have a large volume titled something like, The Greatest Science Fiction Short Stories 1910-1959, something like that... It's a hell of a good place to start. Unfortunately my personal library of sci-fi books burned up a few weeks ago, so I can't really loan you any myself. But Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg, Philip Jose Farmer; you should seek out stories by them, they're names that stick out. Heinlein tends to specialize in novellas moreso than short stories, but they're worth the extra time, and his full-length novel Stranger in a

[frent]

Another good friend of mine has quite a few Dostoevsky books. I'll see if she'll let me borrow them. I just need to read more books in general. Haven't done much reading since high school, even though I buy books all the time.

I like the quote. It makes a lot of sense when I think about getting ideas out. If I likened it to characters instead of novels, I'd say I came up with 4 or 5 not-so-great characters before I came up with a couple I really liked.