Sunday, October 30, 2011

First Words: Prologue to Emma's Play

Novel #4: Emma's Play.


Put all thoughts aside and simply write. Reconnect with my inner artist/writer.
Here it is:


Prologue

Tell the stories that are waiting to be told.
The words are written on a strip of paper in bold, block letters, each one a statement in and of itself, serving as a daily reminder to him.
He doesn’t know where he first read the line, but it served as his mantra for the past three years, his own literary  guide and drive.
Tell the stories that are waiting to be told. He reads the words again and closes his eyes.
“What are the stories waiting to be told?”
Music spills from the speakers on his computer, drowning out everything except the physical presence of his bedroom around him and the tumble of thoughts in his head.
Minutes pass, lengthen themselves into the form of an hour, before he finally breaks from reverie. With a startling quickness, he lunges for the pen lying on the desk and sets pen to paper. The computer is there but nothing beats the primal relief of gliding a pen tip across off-white paper. The words appear beneath his hands, sure in their placement, each one sinking into the blue lines with firm conviction and belonging.
Act I.
Emma:
He writes late in to the night, never once stopping. Pages fly by. The angry crossing outs that usually pepper his work stutter to an eventual stop, and the words flow effortlessly. The midnight silence guides him through his thoughts word by word, line by line. He writes until his mind and body collapse into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Tell the stories that are waiting to be told.



Comments would be great :)

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Readability

Sometime back in January or so of freshman year, a friend and I came up with the basic ideas for a thriller/romance novel. She spammed me with a list of character names, and in a few weeks and multiple pages of outlining (which are now safely sealed in a plastic sleeve), I sketched out the underlying structure of the (to date) biggest writing project of my life: SQuared.

SQuared took me three years to write (freshman - junior year of high school) and I literally finished editing it a few weeks ago. The proof copy is now sitting on the shelf in my dorm at Hopkins, the novel officially available online at amazon.com
It was an exciting project, something that was massive in complexity, thoroughly researched, and painstakingly edited. I invested such immense amounts of time into that thing.

And then I come across this website (when I should be writing my half of a 30 page paper for JHUMUNC): online-utility.org. It's a site that takes the numbers and measures the readability of your work. So I copy and paste the SQuared manuscript, all 150 pages of it, into the little box.
Here's what it spat back at me:
Number of characters (without spaces) : 375,231.00
Number of words : 83,695.00
Number of sentences : 8,758.00
Average number of characters per word : 4.48
Average number of syllables per word : 1.43
Average number of words per sentence: 9.56

Indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading
Gunning Fog index : 6.25

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text :
Coleman Liau index : 7.47
Flesch Kincaid Grade level : 5.00
ARI (Automated Readability Index) : 4.46
SMOG : 7.94
Flesch Reading Ease : 76.27

List of sentences which we suggest you should consider to rewrite to improve readability of the text : (a list of basically half the dialogue in the book).

I'm not sure if there's a problem with the fact that I write at a 5th - 7th grade level. But hey, I'm doing ok on my English papers, and I still got a solid A on my history paper, so for the time being I'm going to go out on a limb here and make the claim that I can write. If nothing else, I wrote 84,000 words in one word document.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Directions to where I live

This is inspired by Stephanie Kallos, author of Broken for You, because I'm bored and can't sleep. This can also be found on my site.

-- >> Begin in the heart of the City That Never Sleeps, New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of, on the day that Troy was sacked and burned to the ground.

Learn to stand too early, learn to walk too early, learn to scream far too early. Fall over backwards onto the kitchen floor. Go overseas to the far Orient and get water poisoning, be spoiled, watch Disney in a foreign language, eat delish, legit Chinese food. >>

>> Return to the States, realize you're in New Jersey, and there's a thing called a sister. Get in trouble in kindergarten for talking in class, when you don't even speak English. Kick a boy while wearing heavy winter boots, learn to speak English, fool around with poetry.
Grab the hand of the really pretty blond girl in your first grade class, become best friends.
Play piano, play Czerny finger exercises, type piano, scream and cry over that piano. Quit piano, because clearly there's no way that's working out. >> 

>> Lose your first kiss on a dark dance floor. Write a novel when nearly ten years ago you didn't even speak the  language that you're writing in. Publish the week before your sixteenth. Fall in (puppy) love. Cry over puppy love. Write angry poetry and another book. Survive junior year of high school with five AP classes and a season of studying on the driveway. Lose your most dramatic high school kiss on another dark dance floor. Do Model UN seriously, then wear Chinese dresses to Model UN and make speeches about a stuffed panda toy.
Go back to the Orient, dine with the executives of a global financial superpower.
Write college applications through the night, cry over college applications, cry and worry about everything that crosses your mind. Check your email. Get into Johns Hopkins.
Flirt in Spain. Fall in complete adoration for eighty elementary school students. Carry four year olds on your lap for two months. >>

 >> Study hard. Work hard. Party harder. Hate numbers, love lots else. Play in a hurricane. Fall for someone already, forget him in two days. Get your first B on an English paper, own your first college history paper with a solid A. Slip on marble, sleep at 3am. Study, read, drink, dance, bring it home. Burn your stomach, ravage your neck with pressure-popped blood vessels. Publish some more books. >>

>> Procrastinate macroeconomics reading. Write this. >>

You. Are. Here.

Now: Give me directions to you. -- >>