Updated Posting Schedule

Ben Snyder's M:tG articles are by far the most popular on the site, so we will continue to offer as many as two articles per week, and we are looking for more authors to write about Gaming.  If you are interested, submit to wherethemeatcomesfrom at gmail dot com.

Unfortunately, the rest of our content has not proven nearly as popular.  The "On Writing" blog will be shifting to a single weekly appearance on Thursdays for now.  We will still feature short fiction, poetry, and photography should any be submitted.

Thanks to everyone for your visits, and we will try to provide more content as it becomes possible to do so!

On Writing: Part Nine

Story-crafting is a term that I prefer over most others when it comes to discussions about the act of “writing” fiction in the twenty-first century.  To reiterate some of the points I have made earlier in the series, I don’t believe in super-realistic backstories or clever experimental styles, so it is important to have a term that allows me to talk about “writing” in a way that separates my vision of the act and process from the traditional conception of modern “writing”. 

To that end, I want to take a moment to discuss memoirs, as this is by far the fastest growing section of the market after Young Adult Generic Fantasy Romance.  For a memoir to be successful, and I’m not referring to the commercial notion at this point, the author needs to balance craft and truth.  This is almost directly opposite of the tool of the novelist who substitutes fiction for truth.  Because of that, memoir-writing is much more difficult, no matter how interesting you think your own story is, your role becomes communicating that story in an honest way that incorporates the same kind of story-craft that fiction does, but limits it by virtue of mandating that same honesty.

In general, when you join a group dedicated to polishing their memoir, you are entering into a contract with the other authors that you will pretend to find their life interesting in order to help them make it into a story.  Most of the time, I find that even harder than pretending that some would-be novelist’s three hundredth version of Romeo and Juliet is bearable.  (Hence the reason everyone who has ever bought me a copy of Twilight begging me to “just try it, it’s better than you think” receives a paperback version of the play, with the inscription: “No, it’s not.  Read the original.  The dialogue is four hundred years old and is more realistic. And as a bonus, you get no sparkly vampires.)

I do have some advice though, in case you really want to put yourself through the hell of memoir-writing.  Avoid the temptation to include stories that you think are funny or profound.  That’s the extent of my advice, and it can be explained rather simply as, don’t tell the stories that make you laugh, unless you are prepared to spend thirty pages on exposition to set context, and don’t tell stories that make you cry, unless you are prepared for people to give you very odd looks when you describe the death of your gerbil. 

The key there is that the stories that most impacted you are memorable to you because of how they shaped your own life.  Your life is very different from that of your readers.  Unless your goal is to share with family some of the embarrassing back-stories behind the joke you tell every year at Thanksgiving, most of your readers are going to respond differently to the events you present.  So tell them the stories that they will think are funny.  These stories tend to be embarrassing for you, or profound in a very general sense.  When writing personal essays and memoirs, having a circle of friends who can tell you, honestly, if something is working is critical.

You can be objective when writing a novel, because in that situation story-craft can guide you and you have an understanding of the goals and process behind your plotting.  With memoir, you will not be objective, no matter how Zen you are, and the temptation to try and present your “building a soap-box derby car with my father” story, complete with lamentations that you never spent enough time with him will override your literary sense to tell a story that matters. 

The memoirists that I read and enjoy tend to write their stories in a way that makes them seem like fiction, but too outlandish to be made up.  If you only have one “stumbling drunk out of the bar one night and going up to Random Celebrity A and slapping his ass before going to Waffle House and getting robbed” story, don’t try and stretch it out to 150 pages.  Just write one essay and move on.

Very few people have lives filled with enough stories to make their memoirs readable, and few of the people whose lives are filled with that kind of content are sober enough to write a whole book.

History Lesson #2: Where is Magic Going? (Bonus Post-Script Rant)

Starting this off, here is a list of the double-faced cards in Innistrad as if they were cards with no transform capability. (This list is in alphabetical order)

Bloodline Keeper, 2BB, Flying, T: Put a 2/2 Vampire into play with Flying, 3/3

Civilized Scholar, 2U, T: Draw a card, then discard a card, 0/1.

Cloistered Youth, 1W, 1/1

Daybreak Ranger, 2G, T: ~this~ deals 2 damage to target creature with flying, 2/2

Delver of Secrets, U, 1/1

Gatstaf Shepherd, 1G, 2/2

Grizzled Outcasts, 4G, 4/4

Hanweir Watchkeep, 2R, Defender, 1/5

Instigator Gang, 3R, Attacking creatures you control get +1/+0, 2/3

Kruin Outlaw, 1RR, First Strike, 2/2

Ludevic’s Test Subject, 1U, Defender, 0/3

Mayor of Avabruck, 1G, Other Human creatures you control get +1/+1.  1/1

Reckless Waif, R, 1/1

Screeching Bat, 2B, Flying, 2/2

Thraben Sentry, 3W, Vigilance, 2/2

Tormented Pariah, 3R, 3/2

Ulvenwald Mystics, 2GG, 3/3

Village Ironsmith, 1R, First Strike, 1/1

Villagers of Estwald, 2G, 2/3

I didn’t include Garruk since for the purposes of this article we don’t need to talk about Planeswalkers.  You can probably guess where I am going with this, but if you didn’t, here is another sort of list:

Krovikan Vampire, 3BB, At the beginning of each end step, if a creature dealt damage by ~this~ this turn died, put that card into play under your control, Sacrifice it when you lose control of Krovikan Vampire, 3/3

Krovikan Sorcer, 2U, T, Discard a nonblack card: Draw a card, T, Discard a black card: Draw two cards then discard one of them, 1/1.

Hipparion, 1W, ~this~ can’t block creatures with power 3 or greater unless you pay 1.

Pale Bears, 2G, Islandwalk, 2/2

Balduvian Shaman, U, T: Change the text of target white enchantment you control that doesn’t have cumulative upkeep by replacing all instances of one color word with another, that enchantment gains Cumulative Upkeep 1, 1/1

Balduvian Bears, 1G, 2/2

Folk of the Pines, 4G, 1G: ~this~ gets +1/+0 until end of turn, 2/5

Barbarian Guides, 2R, 2R, T: Choose a land type, Target creature you control gains snow landwalk of the chosen type until end of turn.  Return that creature to its owner’s hand at the beginning of the next end step.

Goblin Snowman, 3R, Whenever ~this~ blocks, prevent all combat damage that would be dealt to and dealt by it this turn, T: ~this~ deals 1 damage to target creature it’s blocking, 1/1

Balduvian Barbarians, 1RR, 3/2

Balduvian Conjurer, 1U, T: Target snow land becomes a 2/2 creature until end of turn.  It’s still a land, 0/2

Freyalise Supplicant, 1G, T, sacrifice a red or white creature: ~this~ deals damage to target creature or play equal to half the sacrificed creature’s power, rounded down.

Mountain Goat, R, Mountainwalk, 1/1

Flow of Maggots, 2B, Cumulative upkeep 1, Flow of Maggots can’t be blocked by non-Wall creatures, 2/2

Mercenaries, 3W, 3: The next time ~this~ would deal damage to you this turn, prevent that damage.  Any player may activate this ability, 3/3

Tor Giant, 3R, 3/3

Lhurgoyf, 2GG, ~this~ power is equal to the number of creature cards in all graveyards and its toughness is equal to that number plus 1, */*+1

Orcish Librarian, 1R, R, T: Look at the top eight cards of your library, exile four of them at random, then put the rest on top of your library in any order, 1/1

Dire Wolves, 2G, Dire Wolves has banding as long as you control a Plains, 2/2

Again, if you couldn’t tell, the second list is from Ice Age, arranged to correspond with the first list by rarity and/or at least casting cost.  What is humorous, and the goal of this juxtaposition, is to demonstrate that by and large you would probably rather play most of the creatures on the first list, despite the fact that they have been effectively neutered in terms of the modern game by having their transform sides taken away.

The history lesson for today is that even crappy, untransformed versions of creatures from 2011 are leaps-and-bounds better than the creatures of 1995.  So what does this mean?  Well, in this article, we will be discussing how much the game has changed, not only in the power creep attached to creature design, but the actual play of the game itself.

On Writing: Part Eight

Is literature art?  Is writing art?  Are you an artist?  Put simply: yes, no, and no.  Whenever a writer first loads up Microsoft Word and stares at the blinking cursor* I feel like they imagine that they are the only person around the world who has ever done so.

That sums up the last question in my eyes, but the first two are more complicated.  You can define art however you want to (no, really, you can, according to the “Art World”, the definition of art has, apparently, become as amorphous as the pink ooze beneath New York City) but literature has always existed in a strange little zone of its own, so we will go back to that question in a moment.

More important is the issue of whether “writing” is art.  I steadfastly maintain that it isn’t.  I enjoy reading Jackie Collins or Katie Baker, but I would be hard-pressed to claim that either produce much in the way of “art” unless you have a gun to my head**.

My general rule is this: count the number of adverbs that appear in the text in question.  If the number is more than 0, it probably isn’t art (this does, sadly, mean that almost all of my work falls into the “not-art” category). 

I’ve read well over nine thousand books, and several thousand (honestly, probably millions) more articles, poems, funny photo captions, and back-of-the-DVD enticements, and I can say that only Finnegans Wake strikes me as being an artistic work of writing.  I’m exaggerating.  But only slightly.

The most explicit point I can make is that writing is an activity that almost everyone can do.  For that reason, almost everyone cannot produce something that I would consider art.  I’ve been critical of the kind of writer who attends workshops, or posts their writing on their “blog”, or prints their novel through Xlibris (I may not have mentioned that yet), and the reason I am so critical is not that I don’t enjoy the writing (although I very rarely do) but instead because it allows criminally inept hacks to indulge the illusion that they are artists. 

I have actually published stories, poems, and articles, and yet, I never, ever, make the mistake of claiming to be a writer in public (except when someone forces me to, usually by paying me). 

If this makes you wonder why I have a daily column about writing, so be it, but keep in mind that the website still isn’t “live” (after almost four months) and they’ve given up on editing my parenthetical asides.

When you get down to it, very few people engaged in the business of constructing sentences for money are even writers.  Less than 1% of them are artists.  That shouldn’t stop any single person from trying, as my goal is to encourage more people to write better, but it is meant as a realistic “shut-the-front-door” for anyone believing, just because they own a beret and know the difference between a cappuccino and macchiato, that they are producing “art”.

*How incredibly depressing is this sentence?  I asked three writers:

“So fucking true.  Damn.  It’s pencils and cassette tapes.  My kid has worse handwriting than I do, and I’ve worked for fifteen years to perfect my scribble.”

“I don’t know if this is depressing.  I doubt anyone cried when the typewriter was invented.  Do you think typewriters are somehow better than word processors?”  (My response to this was: “Who the fuck uses the term, “word processor”?)

“The cursor haunts my dreams almost as much as everything that seems underlined in squiggly red or green lines.  Why doesn’t it know that I am writing dialogue?  It’s horrifying.  I don’t need your judgement, Bill Gates.  And yes.  I can spell judgement with an ‘e’, no matter what you tell me.”  (This is true.  MS Word prefers dropping the ‘e’, but really, it’s a judgment call ::drum roll and cymbal crash::)

**Note: the number of things people will not do with a gun to their head drops 100% in the actual situation of having a gun to their head.  Writers, please keep this in mind the next time your character refuses to do something they don’t want to do out of principle even with a loaded 9mm pointed at their temple.  Real human beings will do whatever it is 999 times out 1000.  (Exceptions include sociopaths, psychopaths, and other forms of severe mental disease, only very rarely including “love”)

U/W Combo for Champs 2011

There are actually a few things to take into consideration if you are planning on playing this deck either at FNM or the 2011s.  This article assumes you read the first, hastily posted version from Monday, so if you haven’t, please take the time to go back and do so.

Although I don’t usually like using lists, this is meant as an overview of some of the things I didn’t discuss on Monday, so it appears in relative order of importance.