Category Archives: writing

30 Days of Writing #7: Music While You Write?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

7) Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?

I used to listen to music while writing. In the days when I lived alone, it was common for me to write while a lineup of CDs played in the background. Generally, it would have to be music that related to what I was writing, in tone if not in lyric–in fact, the less distracting the lyrics, the better. It was rare that I would write in silence.

After marrying, I started writing more in the mornings and on weekends, usually without music or any other noise-maker in the background. True, I could have listen to CDs (and now, MP3s) with headphones (or ear buds, now, which I loathe to use), but that, too, is a distraction. Sometimes what I’m writing gets me so wound up I have to get up and move around. And silence, as it turns out, works pretty well for me. Better, I think, than filling the world with noise ever did.

Songs that would usually make it into the background, when I wrote with music, were freuqently ones that applied to characters, or at least what they were faced with. During the time when I was writing a lot of Superguy material, this tended toward the bombastic and over-the-top, which suited the plots I was coming up with just fine. During the writing of some parts of Brutal Light, I favored music that was on the darker edges of elecronica/trance, including discs by Philosophy Major, Massive Attack, and Thievery Corporation. Which is not to say I don’t like a variety of music–it’s just that it’s harder to write some things while jazz music is playing, and harder to write others while bands are rocking out in the background.

30 Days of Writing #6: Writing Where, When, and With What?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

6) Where are you most comfortable writing? At what time of day? Computer or good ol’ pen and paper?

These days, I’m most comfortable writing at home at the PC in the guest bedroom-slash-den. When we moved to the townhouse we now rent, I set up my old iMac in the basement with the idea that I would be writing there, mostly in the morning before my day job commute, or on weekends. But whereas the finished basement in our former house was perfect for that sort of thing, the unfinished basement in the townhouse is not. So I write upstairs now. Still mostly in the mornings, and on weekends. Not too often in the evenings; that time sees me either exercising, having dinner, reading, or spending time with family and friends.

I try to stay flexible as to the when and where of writing, as even limited opportunities are better than none at all. Or worse, opportunities wasted–of which, regrettably, I’ve had my share and then some.

I know there’s a school of thought that suggests that writing using pen and paper encourages better work by discouraging needless verbosity and unnecessary scenes. That as may be–I, in attempting to write this way, find it only encourages my hand to hurt. And if I’m thinking about my hand while I’m writing, I’m not ‘in the story,’ a zone my brain has to be in if the story that comes out at the end is going to be satisfactory. Writing at the keyboard–any keyboard, though ideally one connected to a computer–lets me forget about my hands and get on with the storytelling. Which is worth all the additional editing in the world.

(Luckily, carpal tunnel has yet to find me. Hopefully it will stay that way!)

30 Days of Writing #5: Youngest and Oldest Characters?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

5) By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest? How about “youngest” and “oldest” in terms of when you created them?

My youngest character would have to be Luca Blackwood, the seven-year-old protagonist of Onyx Fire, the children’s book I co-wrote with my wife (which is also In Search Of… a publisher). It was an interesting experience writing her, as I’m not ordinarily disposed to write pre-adolescent characters–partially because most of my works are aimed at a more mature audience, partially because it’s hard for me to orient my brain toward such a perspective.

My oldest character, as near as I can estimate from a brief survey of my memory, would be Cyane, the siren antagonist of my as-yet-unpublished short story Fabulous Beasts. She hails back to Greece of mythological times. A bit easier for me to work with; that is to say, her age was not her most challenging aspect.

In terms of creation date, my ‘oldest’ character of consequence is likely Rad, protagonist of a self-titled series set in the Superguy shared-universe humorous superheroic fiction list. I essentially lifted a persona and character I created for a Villians and Vigilantes game and ran with it… and somehow, it worked.

‘Youngest’ in terms of creation date would be a character from what I’m working on right now; as such character is still in flux, I’d rather not talk about him too much–save to note that he’s a right bastard. Right bastards are always fun to write.

30 Days of Writing #3-4: Names for characters and places? First story?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

Questions 3 and 4 I don’t have a lot to say on, so I’ll do both in one post:

3) How do you come up with names for characters (and for places if you’re writing about fictional places)?

I don’t really have any set ‘way’ for doing this. Usually, one name, either first or last, will occur to me for a particular character, and I’ll cast about for the rest of the name so as to come up with something that sounds distinctive without calling attention to itself as The Writer Being Clever. Rarely will I go hunting for a name based on its ‘meaning’ as described in various baby name books and websites, though often once I have a name I’ll take a peek at said ‘meaning,’ just to satisfy my curiosity.

4) Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!

Twilight Zone-ey, and someone, possibly a ghost, got impaled on a bunch of spears at some point. I remember it as having stood out from the other stories being written by my classmates–slice of life High School stuff, near as I can recall–but no more than that.

30 Days of Writing #2: Character count and gender preference?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

2) How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?

There’s no way I’m going to try to count all my characters from everything I’ve written, of course. There are about eight or nine ‘major’ characters in my novel, Brutal Light, plus a handful of minor ones and the usual hordes of the unnamed and unnamable. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what this question is intended to reveal; to me, quantity alone is meaningless, whether it has to do with word count or character count or whatever else count.

‘Preference’ is a different matter. Being a guy, I suppose I find it ‘naturally’ easier to write from the perspective of a male character, but not to a degree where I feel an actual catagorical preference. If I know enough about a character to where she or he is more than just the sum of her or his ‘categories,’ it matters less to me what those categories actually are.

(Of course, it should be noted that whether or not I can successfully write a character who occupies categories other than my own is a different question, and a different debate altogether. Which is why I’m leaving it for a different day.)

30 Days of Writing #1: Favorite Writing Project / Universe?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

1) Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you’ve worked with and why.

My favorite universe is that of the Superguy shared-universe humorous superheroic fiction group. I poured a lot of work into the various series I wrote for it in the early-to-mid nineties, and made a lot of friends there along the way. Writing for it was an experience that affected me in too many ways to count, large and small. The most obvious of these, to me, is that it gave me a chance to write a lot for an audience that, while generally appreciative, did not stint on the criticism where warranted (and, let’s be honest, sometimes where not warranted–when I recall some of the things we argued about that we thought were so terribly important, I have to shake my head in disbelief). I would not be the writer I am without Superguy. It’s a part of me, and I’m still happy to write for it (though I write a lot less for it than I once did).

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The ’30 Days of Writing Questions’ are a meme set of 30 questions I originally encountered on J. Koyanagi’s site, even though the meme apparently originated on LiveJournal. Even though it says ’30 days,’ I’ve decided to take a much slower (one day a week) approach to answering these. I’d rather promise weekly content and deliver than promise daily content and renege.