Posts Tagged "writer"

How To Do a Kickstarter (Short Version)

Posted by Sharif S on May 30, 2013 in Blog Ends | 0 comments

I hate most crowdfunding.  It’s not really that I have a problem with the concept, but most people irritate me with they way they ask for my money.  It’s like you’re asking ME for money so that you can start a business in which you keep making money, and I get an overpriced ______.  So you should at least try to seduce me a little and not just be a bunch of annoying, entitled 20 something year olds.  Show me that you care.  Show me this is real.  Show me that I’m not just a sucker and a means to an end.  Make me feel like I’m a part of something special, not just something special to you, but to me and the rest of the world.

How do you do that?  Here are some Cliff Notes that should help.  Later I’ll do a more expanded post focusing on the videos, perks, & e-mails.

Image

1. Look like you’re serious (If your project is fun, show that you’re serious about fun).

2. Look like you’ve actually put some of your own money into this project (at least INVEST IN YOUR VIDEO!)

3. Look like you would actually invest in this project yourself.

4. Look like you aren’t just asking someone to pay the rent and buy you Taco Bell while you make art.

Ethics

1. Don’t look like you’re trying to get other people to cover your investment costs while you reap all of the benefits.

2. BE FAIR TO THE PEOPLE GIVING YOU MONEY!

3. Be appreciative of ANY donation.

Sales

1. Don’t pan handle.  A donation should get the donor (no matter how small) something if possible.  Ideally use advance sales of the product or discounts towards purchases of the product.

2. Give people something they would want.

3. Explain to people why your project is something they should believe in and support.

4. If you can, your perks can be used to endorse your product (ie. Free trials, posters, stickers, etc.)

 

So I have to say, my friends Niree Perian, Susannah Luthi, and Kai Chan have done a textbook PERFECT job in all of these criteria with their crowdfunded project of Connu.  You don’t have to donate (though you should if you can) but at least look at how well executed their campaign is and use this as a model for your own projects.

More:
How To Do a Kickstarter: Sharif Acts Like Don Draper on an E-Mail (Public Relations)
How To Do a Kickstarter: Perks
How To Do a Kickstarter: E-Mails
How To Do a Kickstarter (Short Version)

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Underrated Never Talked about Skill for Writers: A Rambly Sort of Thing

Posted by Sharif S on May 15, 2013 in Blog Ends, Writing | 4 comments

Today in class I started bringing up theory again.  Recently I’ve noticed my professor looks at me and smiles when I bring up some obscure topics and essays (I don’t know if she did that all semester or just felt nostalgic because today was the last day of class).  This time it was a piece by a Korean feminist talking about masculinity in oppressed cultures.  She said to me, “I’m always amazed by what you can bring to the conversation.”

Later tonight I went to visit a friend in the hospital.  A week earlier she was just an acquaintance.  In the hospital I argued with a nurse about why her pain wasn’t being managed and why the doctors seemed to think post-op pain of a 9 out of 10 was “normal” and didn’t need treatment.  My mom was a pain management nurse and now teaches nursing at a university.  I learned the lingo.  I learned how to ask for drugs without seeming drug seeking.  I learned how to advocate for my friend.

On the drive home I thought about my teacher’s words.  I realized something I decided was probably the biggest gift to myself.

I came up with two rules for myself:

1. Whenever I didn’t know something, I would ask about it.

This includes what words mean, things I claim to be an expert on, and things that people would probably prefer not to talk about.

2. I would let people talk to me about any subject.

I let my cousins and some of my friends teach me about cars.  I’ve let my sister (a women’s health nurse) teach me about different speculum, benefits of clear plastic over metal, and that some of them have lights.  My mom taught me about pain management in hospitals.  I’ve had people talk to me about all kinds of subjects from Apple products to humor theory to rollercoasters to Wutang Clan.

If you don’t want to hear about something, it’s probably, because you don’t know enough to appreciate it.

These rules will help you develop a sense of curiosity and wonder for the human creature.  Something that should show up in your writing.

Now people will go out and people watch.  Wonderful activity, but also very shallow and superficial.  You’ll only get the surface without context.  If you talk to a person, they will teach you about entirely new ways of seeing the world, maybe these ways aren’t always positive.  Of course this is granted they even want to talk to you.

Most people want to talk about things.  Some people will even talk to you about the worst tragedy to ever happen to them.  More people will tell you these things if they feel you’ll listen and understand.

I won’t tell someone to stop talking.  I’ll interrupt, because I’m so excited about the conversation, but I won’t tell them to stop talking.

It’s beautiful.  The human being.  I was with a girl and angry at the world.  I said, “I have never felt so misanthropic.”
She laughed (and not just at how angsty I was being), “You’re not a misanthrope.  You’re an anthropologist.  I’ve never seen someone so in love with people.”  This was a surprise to me.  I didn’t realize this was true.  I also didn’t realize she could ever show this level of understanding about me.  At least I used to think that.  It must be untrue since I fell in love with her.

Talking to people, reading their blogs will expand your mind more than anything (Even if it’s starting to get unfocused, rhapsodize-y, and digressive).  You’ll never know what you’ll learn and from where.  Did you think you would find a passionate, sincere, intellectual blog about the human condition with a bunch of ponies on it?

I’ve talked to a drunk punk rock bassist in the Inland Empire about his view on the world, it was disparate from the views of a privileged girl I talked to in Orange County, but there is always confluence.  We want the same things: love, respect, to feel special, safety, etc.

We all have the fear of time and being mortal adding pressure on our desires.  From this is conflict.  From this we do our worsts to each other and even our bests.  When written with justice to the characters, this conflict will allow you to see yourself in the worst of people as well as the best.  We are all the same, it’s the priorities and the situations that make us different, whether by nature or nurture.

There’s a price to this, the more you learn what people want and their motivations, the harder it is to judge them.  Although, this seems positive, keep in mind that these people will make you mad.  They will hurt you.  You will feel mad and stay awake at night.  You’ll wish you were just wondering why they would do something to hurt you, but you’ll know why.  You’ll know their motivations, what they want in life.  You’ll know that if you were them, desperate for the same petty things, then you would hurt other people for them as well.  It would be hard and wrong for you to hate them for being who they are.  So you don’t take any action, even though you’re hurt.

With this understanding there’s nowhere for your hate and frustrations to go.  You’re stuck with them.

Sorry, where was I?  Oh, yeah, people will reveal more to you than they realize.  They will tell you their ideologies, their secrets, their experiences even if they don’t intend to.  And isn’t understanding how other people think and act what character work is all about?

That’s not necessarily a rhetorical question.  Let me know how you think about anything I’ve brought up.  Clearly, I’m interested.

PS. For more on this subject read Virginia Woolf’s short story “An Unwritten Novel” to get the value of people watching and some of its drawbacks.  For the benefits of talking to people and how you can learn things about their character that they themselves don’t even realize they are saying read Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”

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Crazy Week

Posted by Sharif S on Apr 25, 2013 in Blog Ends | 0 comments

Hey everyone,

This post will be a little different.  I just wanted to talk about my week, which was pretty crazy.  Mostly my weeks just involve things on Netflix in between homework and independent projects.

Monday:  My short story “Lagomorph” was work shopped by a guest instructor David Francis because our normal instructor Judith Freeman couldn’t make it.  Although, it was very well received and the world was loved, there were a lot of great comments from my classmates and Mr. Francis.

I went home to try to write something like 8 more pages to my already written 2.

Tuesday:  I woke up early and I finished my first 10 pages of my first real attempt at a feature length screenplay.  They were shitty, but entertaining.  I now have a copy of my screenplay with Syd Field’s notes on it.  He mostly wrote that I’m really good at dialogue and my pages failed to have the most important things you need to have in the first 10 pages, dramatic need of your character.  Which I knew I needed.  I’m that guy who is always talking about the dramatic need.  But I panicked to be honest.  Screenwriting isn’t my strongest genre.  So my deadline made me lose my shit.

I work well with deadlines in fiction.  The first draft of “Lagomorph” was finished hours right at the deadline.  Most of which written within 12 hours of it.  But with screenwriting, it is a different beast.  With fiction you write a story logically, and it will flow.  When you write a screenplay it’s like you’re writing a story to a flow.  One is like Eminem on a bus writing words and performing to a beat later.  The other is like George Watsky writing a song to a beat.

Wednesday: I got e-mailed from David Francis.  He was saying how he was still thinking about my short story and was giving me more suggestions about many of my choices in the piece.  We e-mailed back and forth.  Although, many people would see it as “This guy kept messaging me to tell me how bad my work is,” I look at this as, “This author was intrigued enough by my story to keep investing his time to make sure that it becomes something.”  This is both a testament to  David Francis’ character and my draft of the story.

Later someone on Facebook who I only kinda knew from chance encounters in the program, posted something about her thesis being trapped on a laptop which had suffered an attack from a cup of coffee.  She needed help.  Last time something like this happened, a girl I kinda knew needed a ride to the dentist and I volunteered.  She is now one of my closest friends.  So again I offered to help her.  Her hard drive was whirling in the enclosure, but my computer couldn’t access the files.  She thanked me anyway with beer and introducing me to her friend.  So I made 2 friends in one afternoon.

Also I work got a humor piece looked at by one of my writer friends while she was at work.  So she got paid to read my manuscript.  If you workshop with someone who works at a writing center or tutoring service that offers free edits, turn their work hours into a workshop and help them get paid and have more free time.

Thursday: I got a call from my community college tennis coach.  He was asking how I have been and said it was around the time of the Ojai tournament.  He wanted to hear from “The Legend of Ojai” (me).  This title was not earned through tennis ability.  I’ll tell this story at another time in another form.

Most of this day was studying and homework and preparing for my reading on Saturday.  My friend Angie canceled on our plans to play tennis, so I was free to hang out with The Brony Clubhouse who were hanging out at the Buffalo Wild Wings right by my house.  We sang karaoke.  I did “Prince Ali” from Aladdin and at Cayci’s request did “Material Girl” by Madonna.  Some girl thought it was cool to record me.  So if you see video of me singing “Material Girl” kidney punch that bitch.

Of course later Spenser sang “You Got a Friend in Me” and stole the show.  I also got to meet some bronies like Dan.  I got to catch up with other bronies that I’ve met before who are cool and I can never spend enough time with them like Briston, David (Discord), Tyler, Rina-Chan, Nick, and a dude named Jeremy.  I’m sure I’m forgetting people.  Brony Clubhouse crew is like overwhelming with cool people.

While there, actually, some guy approached me to take pictures of some toys people at our table had.  They were custom painted OC’s.  I said sure.  As he was taking the pictures he said, “I’m going to make fun of you guys on /b/.”

I said, “Don’t worry.  Bronies are the internet.”
He said, “You guys are the cancers of the internet.”
I said, “You realize if you post that on 4chan that everyone is just going to ask where they can get their own.”
It was noisy, and I don’t think he heard me.  So if you see OC pony toys on a cup of Sprite, then that was us.

Friday: This day started rad.  I found great parking and I had my first meeting with my thesis adviser, Trinie Dalton.  Getting a thesis adviser is always scary.  I’ve heard horror stories (My adviser never meets with me.  My adviser made me write a horror novel and I hate horror novels!  My adviser was literally on drugs the last time we met).  Trinie was really cool!  She understands what I want to do with my writing.  She knows the type of writer I am and is flexible about my multi-genre thesis.  I decided to push my luck “I want to include a comics section to my thesis.”  She was down.

One problem, she scheduled a meeting right before EQLA.  I told her, “I’m going to a MLP convention and I may or may not have a panel that I may be giving on creative writing.”  She was like BAM!  RESCHEDULED!  YOU TAKE CARE OF THAT MY LITTLE PONY CONVENTION!

Go back to my car to see a parking ticket.  I also noticed that someone hit my car and scratched the paint.  I was on the 110 going home and picked the 101 to Universal Studios in order to cheer myself up and inspire me to write my next 10 pages of screenplay.

I lost my phone there.  I found out when I go to pick my friend Mike (from Westcoaster) up and I couldn’t call him.  He called my phone though:

Woman: Hello?
Mike (kinda drunk): You’re not Sharif!
hangs up.

So I called my phone and it is with the Sheriff’s department in City Walk.

Saturday: Late that night Mike and I watched “Red State,” ovened a frozen pizza and rehearsed for my reading the next day.

Instead of going to awesome shit at the LA Times Festival of Books, I went to Hollywood to get my phone.  That night I read to a packed auditorium.  A small auditorium, but with every seat filled.  Most of the people were my friends, whom I had guilted into coming or who came because they loved me  (more on this later probably).

The reading went really well.  I met a brony named Michael who came to check out my reading of “Best Pony.”  Afterwards he came to me and said that we need to get a reading of “Best Pony” on Equestria Daily.  I might be biased, but I agree with him.

Sunday: More book fest.  More panels.  Worked the MPW booth a little bit.  My friend Mike got some shit signed by the people who do “Knott’s Preserved.”  I dropped Mike at home and did a mad homework blitz.

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Reading Chinua Achebe Part 3: UC Irvine

Posted by Sharif S on Mar 30, 2013 in Blog Ends, Writing | 2 comments

Click to read:
Part 1: High School
Part 2: Community College

At UCI some of the writers were easy to spot early on.  If someone was helpless in the literature class, they were probably a writer.  Sometimes they would defunct a reading by saying “That’s not what writers do,” instead of, you know, something not stupid.  They had trouble with the type of thought required for literary criticism/critical theory.  They were developed to think more from an angle of aesthetic criticism.  In community college, critical theory and aesthetic theory seemed to go hand in hand.  I didn’t realize that they had any difference or that there was a time and a place for each.  I’ll discuss this more in the future.

In this quarter I was just starting to learn to separate my two parts of theories of literature.  This should have been easy.  I was an argumentative Muslim-agnostic living in a Christian country in a very divisive period.  I also had the luxury of being able to pass for Middle Eastern, Hispanic, and/or Caucasian (Yes, even with a name like Sharif. *shrug* People are dumb?).  When people were arguing about the benefits of locking Muslims up for no reason, then I couldn’t argue like an Arab (I’d sound biased).  I’d have to argue like a white Republican American Christian.  I’d point out contradictions of their arguments with the beliefs they testify to like a combination of Ditto and Pheonix Wright.  The way most people code switch from the way they speak at home to the business casual vernacular they speak at work, I could code switch between ethos.  Like Super Nintendo cartridges.  Off.  Pop.  Blow.  Swap.  On.  Let’s play.

However, separating literary criticism from aesthetic criticism was like separating the water from Kool Aid.  Especially when you don’t know that there is a such thing as aesthetic theory.  It was mostly just “How do I reconcile what this person says about literature with what this person says.”  For survival purposes this required a bit of Schizophrenia.  Think this way on Mondays and Wednesdays; think another way Tuesdays and Thursdays.   This process took me years of confusion, internal rhetoric, fights with professors, fights with grad students, looking like a jackass, fear, anger, hate, and suffering.

I read Things Fall Apart twice this quarter.  The first time I read it was to refresh the story in my mind for class discussion, the second time was to write an essay.

In retrospect I realized that the first time I read it at UCI, I read it very much from a critical theory standpoint.  The Igbo culture was a microcosm of the greater struggle of Africa being caught between cultures (though perhaps too obvious, general, possibly not true, and worst of all not enough to make a paper on).

When it was essay writing time, I reread and started hunting for quotes and such.  This time, for some reason, I was looking more at the aesthetics and techniques of the book.  The language was new for me.  I guess this was the first time I really looked at the prose.  It was clear and direct, simple yet elegant.  There was no pretension trying to wax as wisdom.  It was just wise.  Direct, effective, adaptive, and powerful like Bruce Lee’s approach to martial arts, but with words.  Things Fall Apart is a book as much to be experienced as it is to be read, analyzed, and understood.  The language doesn’t have to create a faux complexity and play a game of “hide the secret;” the complexity comes from the honesty, empathy, and understanding from the author.

I noticed the use of folklore, which was a minor theme throughout other works we were studying.  So I wrote an essay on that.  I said how the story of the tortoise and the birds was a microcosm of the greater novel.  I further went on to point out how folklore and a character’s relationship to it was used for characterization and to set up various plot points and relationships including relationships with one’s culture.

I was super excited for this essay, which is a bad sign I’ve learned.  I have a passion for aesthetic theory, which means that it isn’t something I should turn into the critical theorist TA.

I remember right before the essay was due, many of my classmates were at a complete loss of what to write about since there were no prompts.  So I started handing prompts out on subjects I saw but wasn’t passionate about.  Write about the effects of colonialism on women as described by Wole Soyinka in “The Lion and The Jewel” and Mirama Ba’s So Long a Letter.  Use Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions to talk about the role of Western education in African self-awareness (Helpful hint, bring in the teacher’s book Decolonizing The Mind).

These prompts were very literary critc-y.  Everyone who took one of my prompts got an A or an A-.  I got a B- on my paper!  Apparently, an ethnocentric feminist gaze of African polygamy had more legitimacy than discussing the use of African culture to show the greater book as a macrocosm of a piece of folklore.*  Although, it might have helped streamline my paper if I actually knew the words “microcosm” and “macrocosm” when I was 21.

Speaking of folklore, I think I’ll end this in an Aesop.  I was the same human being reading the exact same copy of a book, yet I wasn’t the same person.  My worldview had shifted and so did my view of the world created by Achebe.  If you’re a writer trying to control exactly how people read your book, you are fooling yourself and wasting your time.  People will experience their own book, movie, comic, play, poem…

 

*It also might have helped to have incorporated Keat’s concept of the gyre, which today I still don’t quite understand.  It’s like a self-referential vortex…kinda?  I’m starting to remember why I didn’t try to put that in the essay.

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Reading Chinua Achebe Part 2: Community College

Posted by Sharif S on Mar 27, 2013 in Blog Ends, Writing | 0 comments

(For part one click here)

I was taking a cultural anthropology class where we had to read an ethnography as one of our final assignments.  I read Tales of the Shaman’s Apprentice by Mark Plotkin which is another book in the “which books had a profound impact on you.”

However, when we gave our presentations someone did her presentation on Things Fall Apart which is a book of fiction.  I was kind of upset that I had missed a chance to do a lot less work and reread a book I already knew revisit this amazing text.

Despite my workload, I decided to reread the book anyway.  The book changed.  It became a real world example of how the facts of human nature I had learned from my anthropology class could directly apply to literature.  Now the book was about ethnocide, the loss of one’s culture, the power one’s culture has over our definition of self and over our aspirations, and finally how utterly lost and unstable one can become when all of this is taken away.  When conformity is demanded of a society’s behaviors, when a society’s ideologies are challenged and abandoned, and when this creates changes in that society’s economy and wealth, then what that can do to the individual.

The common reading of the end of Things Fall Apart is that Okonkwo is like Judas who hangs himself for being responsible for the death of Christ, represented by the Christian.  Usually an allusion makes someone evaluate the work through the context of an outside work.  Achebe’s allusion worked in both directions for me, since the typical way of reading this scene seemed not quite right.  I reevaluated Judas through the scope of Things Fall Apart just as much as I thought of Things Fall Apart through Judas.  Did Judas kill himself out of guilt? Or did he kill himself because there was a God who loved him and now he is dead?

In the end Okonkwo’s God is dead: his traditions, his worldview, and everything.  Okonkwo is treated well by the Igbo traditions and religion.  When he kills the Christian, there is the epiphany that the benevolent God is dead, except it isn’t through the death of the missionary, but through the reaction of the crowd.  Their inability to stand up for their way of life against a seemingly unstoppable force shows him that the gods have been acculturated to death.

It would be easy to say that Okonkwo was a victim of an evil, invasive culture, but Achebe didn’t seem to do this.  Things Fall Apart seems more descriptive than prescriptive.  Here are the things, sometimes they are fortunate and sometimes they aren’t.  He could have ignored the mutilation of stillborn babies or the throwing away of twins in the Evil Forest.  But the Igbo traditions, like all traditions, have an aspect of oppression as well as liberation; it depends upon who one is and the circumstances.  This is definitely a theme to Things Fall Apart (hear that high schoolers Googling for cheats on your homework?).

With this theme, I learned Cultural Relativism can actually help create a greater and more complex plot, world, and characters.  I learned a writer has more power being an anthropologist than being a nagging parent demanding the world to conform and behave.  On top of that simply describing a world using your world view, people can’t help but see the same flaws you do.

(Click for part 3)

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