This last week has left me a little dazed, due to a recent development at the art school I attended in Korea this summer. The art school I attended was run by three teachers: the founder (whose name literally means You're Kidding Me! in Korean), her brother (whose name literally means Melancholy: their parents have a strange sense of humor!), and TJ (the teacher who tasked me with creating hundreds of sheets of graphing paper). I was closest to TJ during the summer, and I really looked up to him. He had uncanny draftsmanship and a superhuman passion that granted him the ability to generate a hundred sheets of 11-by-17 graphing paper, front and back, daily, for 6 months straight. He was always very kind and thoughtful, and more significantly, he was the very first person I ever opened up to and shared the stories, worlds, characters I'd been developing privately for the last ten years. I shared characters that not even my closest friends or family had seen. I disclosed the fates I'd been carefully crafting for these characters. I shared dreams I found too deviant or improbable to share with other people. When he abruptly abandoned the school and his students for money, it was just very shocking to me.
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| 2 out of 50 sets of faces TJ had me do, to improve on capturing facial expressions. |
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| Also I swear I am not a pedophile. |
I find it amazing how an opinion of a person can completely flip with a single act, a single moment. Then again, if my best friend showed up at my front door all bloody and said she'd stabbed her neighbor with chopsticks for picking his nose, it goes without saying I would immediately question her character (and sanity). Still, I can't disregard the kindness he showed me during my time there. A kindness that bestowed me the confidence to confide my most personal stories with another person! If anything, this incident makes me realize how human everyone, everything is. The universe itself is not perfect, and if you look at the Bible even God is not perfect! After the events of Noah and the Ark God explicitly states that it was wrong of him to flood the whole world and then promises not to do it again... Man, I am totally going to hell for saying that. If anything, this revelation relieves my fear of criticism by others, because there are both admirable and shameful facets to us all. And if someone cares about me, they will offer their criticism in hopes that my more admirable facets will outnumber the duller ones.
Any fears I had of being judged for sharing weird, crazy or possibly even immoral stories have vaporized dramatically thanks to TJ, and if anything that makes him an important person in my life I care about. So I've emailed him in hopes he'll reconsider what he's done, because I'd really like to see him make the right decision for his other students and to regain my belief in him again. Personal dramas aside, I'm happy I am now mentally capable of sharing my longer stories with you all later along the line. I'm also more determined than ever to finish up the scripts for my series ideas, so I raided the local bookstore to find some aids on story crafting. One particular book I found offered a very interesting technique for figuring out all the 'scenes' in your story, which I thought I would share down below: the book is Make a Scene by Jordan E. Rosenfeld.
The following chart is used to figure out how each scene leads to the next one. The chart comprises of 1) the protagonist, 2) the scene intention, 3) complication and 4) the result.
At the beginning of every scene the protagonist is going to have some sort of goal he/she is going for. This creates the scene intention. Maybe it's to make the stupid dog stop yapping and give it a walk around the park. Maybe it's to grab the last jellybean before your brother does. Maybe it's to enjoy your nice, peaceful doze on the porch for as long as possible. During the scene, invariably something is going to happen that complicates your protagonist's efforts, which results in the end of one scene and the beginning of another.
Here you can see my example of the chart:
| Protagonist | Scene Intention(s) | Complication | Result |
| Bob | Walk the dog to make it shut up. | All the doors won’t open. | Bob gets angry and tries to blowtorch the door. |
| Scruffles the Dog | Make Bob realize the house is alive and not happy about its doors getting blow-torched. | Scruffles can't talk. | The house gets angry and tosses the two into the basement pinball-style. |
| Bob | Try to get out of the basement. | The two are tied up in wires from video game consoles, which Bob is not willing to damage. | The dog gets annoyed and chews through the wires, to Bob’s dismay. |
You would basically extend this chart, letting scene lead into the next scene to craft your story. Obviously some scenes are going to be longer than others. An epic escape through a field of killer lollipops from some giant baking attempt gone horribly wrong is going to run much longer than an attempt to open a jar of pickles.
Also, here is an adorable photo my awesome photographer sister took of my model of my character:
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| We were playing poker for family night, and he was safeguarding my sister's pile of chips.... |
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