Plus he’s got good theology to boot, seeing as how he’s OPC (it’s what PCA Presbyterians would be if we stopped drinking alcohol and joined the Only Perfect Church…).

In any case, I definitely recommend him. He’s scholarly, but easy to read and great with language all around!

To demonstrate that five-paragraph essays stifle creativity, one only need to examine the fact that our greatest heroes in literature are precisely those authors who manage to break the mold, transcend the rules, and demonstrate their greatness through the application of style. This is the essence of creativity, the genius inside a man or woman that enables him or her to soar to heights only slightly lower than the angels can attain. Yet if one attempts to do this in a five-paragraph essay, one finds one’s grade significantly lowered, thus stifling any creative spark that the author may have originally carried.

This follows through to the fact that some subjects simply do not have three points and attempts to add in the third point come across as being ham-fisted or, what is worse, nonintellectual. The fact of the matter is that some subjects can fully be explained in only two points, while others require four or more points to develop. Adherence to the strict guidelines of the five-paragraph essay therefore result in forced attrition via the deletion of relevant data (i.e., the fourth, or higher, points) or, more commonly, forced inflation via the insertion of a third point that stands out like a hippie in a Presbyterian church.

It is inevitable that five-paragraph essays are used by school administrations, therefore, simply to force adherence to dictatorial norms. No concern is given to the fact that students did not decide what these norms should be, or why their essays must be five hundred words in length, or why they must contain five paragraphs arranged in a specific manner. Obedience is demanded, like an anti-proletarian government decreeing obedience from its subjects, where any nonconformity is punished swiftly by various actions of the administration (viz., the reduction of grades, public mockery in the classroom, detention after hours, and sometimes the forced repeating of an entire year’s worth of schooling). Such tactics belong to political dictatorships, not to the realm of academia.

All of the above makes it quite obvious that the five-paragraph essay format is prone to abuse and should be abolished as soon as humanly possible. It is time to evolve. Indeed, there is nothing that is stated in a five paragraph essay that could not be stated without stifling creativity, rigid adherence to three points, or the use of dictatorial tactics.

Just to give an example, one of the big problems that faces new writers is the fact that they are often repetitious. We can often catch a lot of these problems ourselves, but often it takes extra readers to find them. That’s why, for instance, in the dedication I wrote for Public Transit, I included the phrase “Thanks, I suddenly realized, to…” I had used the phrase “suddenly” and “realized” as well as the combo “suddenly realized” a lot in that novel without knowing it; but the readers I gave it to for critiques spotted this flaw instantly.

Let’s make this concrete. Suppose that I wrote the following paragraph:

The wide receiver ran to his starting position. On the snap, he ran down field as fast as he could. Once in the open, he turned back, saw the ball already in the air. He ran to where it would fall, scooped it in his arms, and ran for the end zone.

When I run that paragraph through my stats program, it tells me:

There were 52 total words.
There were 35 different words used.
There were 27 words used only once.

So what this tells me is that in the above paragraph, there were 35 unique words that made up a total of 52 words. That means about 2/3 of the paragraph was unique. More importantly, of the 35 different words used, only 27 of them were used only once. That means that there were 8 words used more than one time.

But here’s where the problem of repetition comes in. See, there were 52 total words, with 27 words only used once (meaning we haven’t accounted for 25 words). There were 35 distinct words, meaning that there were only 8 words that accounted for those missing 25 words! Thus, 48% of this single paragraph was comprised of 15% of the words used in it.

Because the paragraph is so short, we can look at all of the words that appeared more than once:

6 the
4 he
4 ran
3 in
2 as
2 his
2 it
2 to

It’s not a surprise that “the” is high on the list, since “the” is a function word. In this context, so is “he”, “in”, “as”, “his”, “it”, and “to.” Those aren’t a big deal.

But what about “ran”? “Ran” is a verb, not a function word. What happens if we substitute synonyms for the word “ran” in the paragraph?

The wide receiver trotted to his starting position. On the snap, he raced down field as fast as he could. Once in the open, he turned back, saw the ball already in the air. He ran to where it would fall, scooped it in his arms, and sprinted for the end zone.

Now when I run my stats programs, I get the following result:

There were 52 total words.
There were 38 different words used.
There were 31 words used only once.

The numbers have improved. We added three more unique words, and because we only used the word “ran” once, we’ve added four to the number of words used only once. Furthermore, now the only words that occur more than one time are all function words.

Now, 73% of the text is comprised of different words (up from 67%), and 60% of the text is comprised of words used only once (up from 52%). Finally, 40% of the text is comprised of 13% of the words (whereas before 48% was comprised of 15% of the words).

Those numbers show that the second paragraph is objectively superior (assuming, of course, the rules of syntax and grammar are followed). That doesn’t mean it’s subjectively better though, because subjectivity relies on personal taste. However, I would say that generally speaking objective improvements would indicate subjective improvements too.

So why do I bring that up? Well, let’s just look at the numbers for my first chapter of The 13th Prime before I did my edits this weekend:

There were 3684 total words.
There were 1001 different words used.
There were 595 words used only once.

Compared to after my final edit this weekend:

There were 3694 total words.
There were 1053 different words used.
There were 668 words used only once.

You can see that I added 10 words to the total length. However, I added 52 “different words” and 73 “words used only once”!

Now with longer texts, the ratios won’t apply the same way as they did when I examined the single paragraph above. Still, I do look at how often a word appears in the document, and for this size of a sample I don’t want to see non-function words appearing more than around 20 times. That gives those words a cap of about 1/200 (that is, I want to keep non-function words appearing no more than once every 200 words).

Of course there are ALWAYS exceptions to this, so if I read something and artistically feel it’s better to have a repetition, then I’ll include it. But in those instances, I better have a darn good reason to do so!

Anyway, turns out that I was a bit inaccurate in my previous post, as the PDF text-to-speech worked just fine on my friend’s computer at distinguishing between wind (as in “wind-up”) and wind (as in “the wind blows”). The only difference is that he didn’t have Office 2007 (and may have in fact been on XP since the default voice was Microsoft Mike while on Vista it’s Microsoft Mary).

Yet more proof that Vista is a downgrade from XP. Not that more proof was needed.

Anyway, I also have to give a shout out to that same friend, Travis. I’ve finished the latest edit on The 13th Prime and was starting to go through it chapter by chapter (although it doesn’t have real “chapters”…but that’s another story). Since Travis is good at editing and giving his opinion, I sent him the first chapter after I was about 95% confident in it.

Showing he’s a true friend, Travis said: “I can tell this is one of your older works.” Why? “Because you’re much better now.”

Which actually confirmed my suspicious. I had figured that I was 95% done and that it would only take one more draft to iron out a few remaining rough patches, but as I had begun work on the second chapter revisions I had gotten a bit bogged down and had begun to think that it might be a little less than 95% ready. But I was still in that delusional area where I thought I was close enough.

But Travis’s critique was spot on. And more than that, I knew that I was a better writer than my current version of The 13th Prime has me.

Earlier this year, I wrote a short story entitled What Time Can’t Heal. I haven’t posted it anywhere because I entered it into a short story contest which, if I win, will publish it and I don’t want to have the story already archived in Google’s cache before it can get published. But if you were to ask me what my best work was to date, I would say it’s that short story.

After I spoke with Travis this morning, I got to my lunch break and decided to rework the first chapter again. It’s 7 pages long (in default Word format, not book format), and I wasn’t able to get the entire chapter revised on my lunch break. However, as I edited it, I consciously told myself: I’m writing What Time Can’t Heal again. And with that short story in mind—not the plot, not the structure, but rather what I felt internally as I wrote it—I finished up three pages.

And it was so much better than the draft I had given to Travis yesterday.

I’m not saying it’s perfect yet. Because it’s not. I’ll need to do at least two more revisions after I’m done with this one before I’ll get that confident in it (because I’m the kind of person who edits until I get to the point where I think the best I have is a neutral edit; that is, I could change words around but it won’t improve the story. That’s when I’m done editing…and sometimes I think I’m there before I really am too, but again, that’s a different story.)

In any case, this means that the quick final edit I envisioned is now a bit more intricate than originally thought. But the end product ought to blow the current version away without even trying.

So thanks Travis :-)

Oh, and I still blame Bush.

However, despite this drawback, it’s a very useful feature for writers. Why? Because when you’re proofing a document, it’s often best to have it read aloud.

And if you have Office 2007, you can save Word documents as PDF files, open them up and have Adobe read them back to you. (You can also have Microsoft’s software read along too, but it’s a bit easier to set it up using Adobe, IMO.)

In any case, having your computer read your document back to you helps you to find places where you made mistakes, especially involving function words (the words that you kind of “skim” over when you’re reading normally). And since it’s easy enough to get it set up, now any writer can benefit :-)

Pretty good? Okay, it’s awesome. Not perfect, but it’s got my attention at least. Many games these days just don’t have much “playability” to them. I think of the Halo franchise, for instance, where basically what you do is play the same thing every 30 seconds for six hours. It gets really old, really fast in other words. That the Xbox 360 gives you achievement points is really the only reason why you’d bother to play the solo game more than once. At least with multi-player, you have a human you’re responding to, so it’s not the same thing every 30 seconds then. But if you’re doing the campaign…boring is the only word to describe it.

Not so with Dead Space however. DS is one of those horror shooters, where instead of being Rambo and running toward enemies to blast them to little bits, like in games like the Call of Duty franchise (which, I should note, I do like), you’re freaked out by the enemies that aren’t there. So as you’re going down a hall, you hear the creaks and groans of the ship you’re on, and you can hear the aliens growling and grunting, and you know there somewhere nearby, but you can’t see them. Of course, they’ll jump out at you at some point (although that gets somewhat predictable after a time—but even with the predictability, there are some times that still get you).

In any case, I’ve completed 10 chapters of the game. There are 2 left, according to the achievements section (I could look it up online to make sure, but I figure why bother? I’ll finish it tomorrow either way). And the only complaint that I have about the game is the frustration factor that sets in. That’s when you’re told, “We need to get this goal accomplished” and you go forth and get the goal accomplished only to find out someone behind the scenes has sabotaged something else, so now you have to get ANOTHER goal accomplished. This is okay every once in a while, but when it happens at the end of 10 straight chapters, it gets annoying. Not enough to make me stop playing, but enough to make me note it. I think the game play would be better if they just gave you a list of objectives at the very beginning, and said, “Here’s the ten things you’re going to have to do.” Throw in just two or three sabotage events, and the game play is less frustrating because you feel like you’re actually getting somewhere.

And that brings me to the actual point of this post, which isn’t so much a review of Dead Space as it is using the video game to think about story. Many video games these days are getting story oriented. It happens a lot with RPGs, of course, but it’s becoming more obvious in other games that typically don’t have much story going for them. Now I’ve yet to find a video game story outside of RPGs (like, say Final Fantasy VII) that has any real depth to it, but games are getting better at it. It used to be that you could wow people with awesome graphics and they wouldn’t care about the story; now we’re finding that all the awesome graphics in 1990 are hideous today and, therefore, we need a story.

But the important part of the story isn’t the plot; it’s not the sequence of the events that occur. The important part of the story is the character development. And this you’ll find true of stories in general. Take, for instance, Robert Ludlum’s Bourne trilogy (I mean the books, not the movies). What made the first book so compelling is that you actually cared about Jason Bourne. You struggled with him as he sought to reconcile his good beliefs with all the evidence he was collecting that he was an assassin. How could he be a cold-blooded killer?

The movie, on the other hand, jettisoned the character of Bourne and instead focused on the actions. They weren’t even the actions of the book, but that’s another issue. Bourne became an action figure, and the result was that the first movie was lame. You didn’t care about what happened to Bourne. You had nothing invested in him. The only virtue he brought was that he could do cool moves that you couldn’t do, and even that is something that we subconsciously recognize as a cheat because of trick photography and wire work.

The net result: if you want something good, character always trumps action. If you care about the character in your story, absolutely nothing could happen and it’ll be a great story. If you don’t care about the character in your story, he can win the world and you won’t want to read the story ever again.

Dead Space doesn’t have much characterization in it, but it does have more than the average FPS. You’re given more than just a set of objectives to fulfill. Even so, the game would have been so much better had the gamers tried to invest a bit more in building empathy for the characters in the story and the people who play the game. So it’s a good first step, but an even better first step was F.E.A.R. which, incidentally, is of a similar horror game genre—in fact, the first time you play that game if you don’t know what’s happening, you’ll end up firing about 20 shots at nothing (the first level is a training level so there’s no real threat, but it’s set in the story so you think there’s a threat).

In any case, there is perhaps hope for the future. Game developers are reaching a state where they can no longer hide deficient story with the “coolness” factor of better graphics or sounds. We’re pretty much maxed out there (about the only thing that’ll be better is when they get a 3-D game). This means that story is becoming more important, and as a result I predict that in the next five years or so we’re going to finally get the types of good stories found in RPGs over in action games.

CONGRATS TO TRAVIS!!!!

Yup, he’s breakin’ out the ol’ cigar now. Well, he would be if he was a Presbyterian….

Oh well.

Anyway, today I edited through two different stories I’m working on. They’re both basically complete now. One, Snake Oil, is ready to go; I’ll try to submit it tomorrow, but since work is going to be a bear (we’re doing one of those HR-forced-bonding experiences called an all staff “picnic” so that means that we have to be finished with all our work before we go, which only accomplishes us having to do 8 hours of work in 3 hours…you know, kinda the “let them make bricks without straw” mentality) I might end up not sending it off until Monday. And re-reading that sentence I have to say: “Hello. I’m a professional writer.”

Anywho, the other short story is at a point where I feel comfortable saying it’s done, but knowing me that means that I need to do another revision of it to make sure. Otherwise, after I submit it I’ll look at it and go, Why does this sentence have two periods?

Editing stories isn’t anywhere near as much fun as writing them. On the other hand, it’s not as easy either. On the other foot (I ran out of hands, ya see), it’s the only way to get published.

Stupid Bush.

I only bring this up because I just had to do that with a scene I worked on for a story I’ve written entitled Snake Oil. It’s a short story that topped out at 5,500 words. Unfortunately, the places that I’ve looked to send it for publication want everything under 5,000 words. There was a specific scene, however, that I knew could go, and it was just over 600 words long.

It was a tough decision because I like the scene, but on the other hand the story works perfectly fine without it. And while I lose two sentences that I thought were extremely well written, the benefits to losing this material is better than keeping it. It got to the point where I just couldn’t justify keeping it, especially in lieu of the fact that the publications I’m sending it to have word length restrictions.

Oh well. This is the way things go sometimes. And it’s better as a writer to be able to let go of a scene than to hold on to it and ruin your chances.

In between working on some short stories and editing The 13th Prime for what will hopefully be the last time (we shall see how that goes!), I’ve dug out my old NaNoWriMo story from last November. I read through it last night to get the flavor of the story once more, and I’ve been working on it now too, filling in the gaps, etc. As you may recall from last November, I wrote the novel just to get 50,000 words, and I did succeed at that. But the novel wasn’t finished. I only got the entire first act and portions of the second act (as well as the very end of the third act) finished.

Part of the reason why I didn’t write more on it is because a lot of the sections that are left are extremely complicated to write. Not in the sense of looking for research or anything of that nature. All I can say about it is, once it’s finished you’ll have to read it to understand. And you will understand why it would be difficult to come up with those portions.

Anyway, as I read it there were many times when I felt that feeling: It doesn’t feel like I wrote this. I surprised myself in a few places even. Words and turns of phrases that I forgot I put in.

Ironically, just the other day I was talking to my friend Travis and I mentioned how even working on The 13th Prime, which I think is a good novel, I still feel that Public Tranist was better. Public Transit had a certain quality to it that I told Travis I didn’t think I could ever duplicate.

But having read through my NaNoWriMo project, even hacking out some of the bad prose that I had put in just to ensure I got over 50,000 words, I have to say that that story definitely has the potential to surpass Public Transit in my esteem. I can’t wait to finish it and share it with the world, not because I want money (although that would be nice, of course!) but because I think it’s actually really, really good.

FWIW, I would love to write a book some day that Stephen King would say “I wish I had written that” about. For that matter, before M. Night fell into the deep end of the pool, I wanted to write a script that he said “I wish I had written that” to as well.

Oh well. At least it’s a goal, even if one that I will most likely never attain. :-)

II.
Look beyond the mystic show
To a knowledge we impart
The shadows, the darkness
With heartfelt hate embracing

Over what pale skies clear
Find purposeful wisdom forever near
Catacombs and dungeons hear
A bitterness, raging fear.

III.
Look beyond the mystic show
Over what pale skies clear
To a knowledge we impart
Find purposeful wisdom forever near

The shadows, the darkness
Catacombs and dungeons hear
With heartfelt hate embracing
A bitterness, raging fear.

Note: It took me about an hour this morning to come up with this little poem. When I wrote it, I was looking more for structure than for any thematic concerns.

The structure, which some of you may have gleaned by reading it already, is as follows. The first block contains the four lines that are in A-A-A-A rhyme scheme. If you take every other word of the first block starting with the first word, you create the first stanza of the second block. If you take every other word starting with the second word, you create the second stanza of the second block. Finally, the third block shows what happens if you alternate between the two stanzas. Thus, the first line of the first stanza of the third block is every other word of the first line of the first block starting with the first word; the second line of the first stanza of the third block is every other word of the first line of the first block starting with the second word. Etc. It may be easier to say that the third block consists of the first line of the first stanza of the second block followed by the first line of the second stanza of the second block, followed by the second line of the first stanza of the second block, etc.

Of course, all of it should be easy to see if you just look at the poem itself :-P

I should note that there can be improvement with my method above. For instance, you can see that the first stanza of the second block has no rhyme scheme at all; this could be fixed if I spent more time on it. Furthermore, the poem itself could use a little ironing out. But all in all I think it’s a fairly successful first attempt at combining two stanzas into one.