Tag: photo

When I grow old I will make games

Do it yourself

If I want to make games, what do I have to do?

Just as if you want to work on any other activity, there’s only one way: become a professional. That means you’ll have to work hard, to study and to practice.

As the industry grows (and they already say it moves more money than movies or music), more courses pop up that address videogames especifically. I cannot recommend any in particular as I don’t have any references, but some Google searches should offer results for your area. As in any new business model, you’ll come across amateurs wanting to make easy money by lack of competition and true professionals trying to consolidate the industry. Ask for references on the faculty and study the offers throughly before handing out your money.

The problem is that in most cases, companies will not know either if the course you’ve studied is worth anything or not. So in order to prove your worth, practice will be more useful. Cancel your suscription to the popular magazine that only copypastes the distributors’ press releases (by the way, it’s most of them) and find publications with a critical eye that not only sell titles but also analyze the industry. Find the odd book on the subject and dip in. Play all kinds of genres on all available platforms and analyze those games, their merits and flaws, the twists that work, the cheap tricks, how they came to be at all.

But above all, mingle with people with the same interests and make games. The best item in your CV for a company is a finished piece of work. Illustrators don’t get assignments through the promise of their sketches: you’ll want to present full games.

What are you talking about, full games? All I know is how to write! Ah, nobody said it was easy! You’ll have to learn more. Tomorrow I’ll tell you what, and more importantly why.

New!

Danger! Author armed!

Here concludes the monographic week devoted to Frank McCourt, I hope you liked it. If you intend to purchase the books, I’d like to remind you that by doing so through the links we provide, a small commission will reach this website and help support the Writing Workshop.

This week also served to kick off two new experiments:

  • First, the less evident of them: the use of my own photography to illustrate the posts. Indeed the images from Thursday and Friday are my own work. Like everybody else these days, I’ve been using Google Images too often, and I was getting tired of the impersonal copy-paste. The workshop deals with words so sometimes it’s hard to think of an image that adds anything, but at the same time I think the site looks nicer with pics, so I hope by using my own photos the selection of images will be, perhaps not more relevant, but at least more personal.
  • The second novelty of the week was obviously, the monography itself, or the series of posts, or the episodic article, however you like to call it. The next series will be ready very soon, and I would suggest you to call in your comic-fan friends… I will say no more for now.

Finally, a little reminder: we are still tweaking the website quite often. Due to this, it’s possible that the audios of our podcast have been duplicated in your iTunes – sorry about the inconvenience. If that is your case and you wish to free that space, you only need to delete the duplicate entries – the feed will continue to work normally. If you find any other problem, like missing images or broken links, please let us know through the contact form. Thank you all, and have a nice weekend!

Dead fathers III, the living grandpa

Mr. McCourt, you’re lucky. You had that miserable childhood so you have something to write about. What are we gonna write about? All we do is get born, go to school, go on vacation, go to college, fall in love or something, graduate and go into some kind of profession, get married, have the two point three kids you’re always talking about, send the kids to school, get divorced like fifty percent of the population, get fat, get the first heart attack, retire, die.

Jonathan, that is the most miserable scenario of American life I’ve heard in a high school classroom. But you’ve supplied the ingredients of the great American novel. You’ve encapsulated the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

They said I must be joking.

This is the big difference between genre fiction and literary fiction. In literary fiction the content doesn’t matter as much as the vision. If you can portray everyday events in a unique way, like only you can express them, you’ve earned a place in writer’s heaven.

So go out, live life, unplug the antenna from the TV and do everything that Jonathan says and quite a lot more besides, as much as you can. And if you still want more things to experience, take over everbody else’s life.

Image of the "Rent Collection Courtyard" sculpture group exhibited at Schirn Museum, Frankfurt (2009)

So, sit with your grandmother. Let her tell her story. All the grandmothers and grandfathers have stories and if you let them die without taking down their stories you are criminal. Your punishment is banishment from the school cafeteria.

Yeah. Haw, haw.

Parents and grandparents are suspicious of this sudden interest in their lives. Why you asking me so many questions? My life is nobody’s business, and what I did I did.

What did you do?

Nobody’s business. Is it that teacher again? […]

Others come in with stories of how they ask their elders one question about the past and the dam bursts and the old people won’t stop talking, going on till bedtime and beyond, expressing heartache and tears, yearnings for the Old Country, declaring love for America. Family relationships are rearranged. Grandpa isn’t taken for granted by sixteen-year-old Milton anymore.

In World War II Grandpa had adventures you wouldn’t believe. Like he fell in love with the daughter of an SS officer and nearly got killed for it. […] All these years Grandpa sits in the corner and I never talked to him and he never talked to me. His english still isn’t good but that’s no excuse. Now I have him on my tape recorder and my parents, my parents for Christ’s sakes, are saying, Why bother?

Even us, writers, are like our Grandpas: we don’t believe our stories matter. Do they matter? McCourt’s story mattered, his books selling by the millions.

Write on. You’re next.

Dead fathers II, moon landing

Yesterday we saw how an apparently trivial scene -an almost unbelievable one- can carry a strong emotional load.And that isn’t achieved through big abstracts words to emphasize the characters’ feelings. Instead, the emotion comes from what we know about the characters and how, through our own experiences in the world, we can relate to that -the pain of losing a parent, the contrast between the dinner and the hospital room, the loneliness. It’s the old “show, don’t tell”. This is how we build stories, scene by scene, adding on what we know from the previous one. No need to underline what the characters feel. Note how the dialogue doesn’t include any speech notes, yet from his words we know that the teacher does not believe the story.

Here’s another of McCourt’s students’ stories about dying fathers, from “Teacher Man”, chapter 16:

photo by Álex Hernández-Puertas

Phyllis wrote an account of how her family gathered the night Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, how they shuttled between the living room television and the bedroom where her father lay dying. Back and forth. Concerned with the father, not wanting to miss the moon landing. Phyllis said she was with her father when her mother called to come and see Armstrong set foot on the moon. She ran to the living room, everyone cheering and hugging till she felt this urgency, the old urgency, and ran to the bedroom to find her father dead. She didn’t scream, she didn’t cry, and her problem was how to return to the happy people in the living room to tell them Dad was gone.

This could be a micro-story in itself, because it tells more than it contains: it starts before the beginning (we can imagine a long sickness, the arrangements for the family gathering) and it continues beyond the end (when the news are passed and the smiles fade).

But don’t mistake a scene and microfiction and a novel. They are different things. You can hardly build a novel out of great scenes unless they are logically (and emotionally) connected and you can hardly say you master the techniques of narration if all you play is the guessing game of microfiction.

If McCourt’s books lack anything it’s direction, but we forgive that because they’re non-fiction. Autobiographical elements can bring colour and feeling into your story, can bring -quite literally- life into your writing, but real life rarely has a purpose, a plot, a direction, a meaning, a theme. Fiction feeds on these. Juggle them all at your convenience. Or as the saying goes, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. I’m sure even McCourt didn’t.

Lost. Execute.

Spanish TV channel Cuatro has invited LOST fans to create posters for the 6th season of the show using only their own graphic material. I came up with the image you can see here. The text reads: “LOST. SEASON 6. EXECUTE.”

At the time of writing, the poster presides the selection of favourites of the website.

Additionally, if nothing goes wrong, the image will be published this weekend, along with other selected fan-made posters, on EP3, the cultural suplement of the national newspaper El País.

To celebrate the little happy event, I’ve open a small new section of the site devoted to my published graphic works.

(Español) Exposición fotográfica